by Miles Mathis
First published August 5, 2014
This short article is a warning to my readers, some of whom may have some interest in Graham Hancock. For those who don't know, Hancock has written a series of bestsellers on ancient civilizations, Atlantis, Peru, Egypt, and the search for the Ark of the Covenant. His most well-known book is probably Fingerprints of the Gods, which brings Donnelly's 1882 book Atlantis into the present century, updating it with more current research and a more transparent language. We are told it has sold over 3 million copies. I have read several of Hancock's books and they are indeed beguiling. He knows how to mix science, travel, and marginalized theory into a good story, and he seeds all his books with enough real research, truth, and interesting speculation to keep you turning the pages. That said, I have always been suspicious of him, if only because of his connections. His books have been published from the beginning by the major publishers [Touchstone and Three Rivers Press, which are imprints of Simon&Schuster and Random House, respectively], which is in itself a red flag. Velikovsky was shunned by the major publishers, and with the consolidation (monopolization) of the major publishing houses since the 1960's, things have certainly not gotten better for non-mainstream writers or opinion. So if Hancock has no support from the mainstream, as we are told, how did he score these book contracts? You really need to ask yourself that.
Beyond the book contracts, he has benefited from large amounts of promotion in the magazines and newspapers and on TV and the internet. If he has no support from mainstream science, who is promoting him and why? He was even promoted on TED, probably the most high-profile “intellectual” promotion there is these days. You will say he was then censored temporarily by TED, but as it turns out, that censoring only helped him sell more books. It looks to me to have been part of a planned promotion.
To understand how that would work, you have to understand that Hancock is part of the controlled opposition. He was created to provide readers with an alternative path, making sure to nonetheless keep them from anything important. He makes these readers feel independent and sometimes revolutionary, and his theories are scripted to appeal to those who are looking beyond the confines of the mainstream. So getting censored by TED was the best thing that could happen to him. It seemed to confirm that he was dangerous to the mainstream.
But when it gets down to it, Hancock is just selling a melange of warmed-over fringe theories, being careful to highlight the least revolutionary parts of them and excise anything in them that is really dangerous to the status quo. In short, he tells you what you want to hear and usually what you have already heard from other people, streamlining it into a salable product that mainstream science may not like but that really does them no harm.
I had a sort of squishy idea this was what he was up to, but until recently that idea didn't have any reason to firm up. I just didn't care enough to do any research on him. But I happened to see an interview of him on RT today with the beautiful and annoying Abby Martin, and he really blew his own cover in spectacular fashion. According to the title of the interview, Hancock was supposed to be “breaking the set” on TED censorship, but instead he ended up breaking his own mask. He started the interview by saying he didn't think mainstream science was “any kind of conspiracy.” Although he was so level-headed and faux-authoritative he almost convinced me of that, I pinched myself and I reminded myself that I already know it is. We have seen mountains of evidence everything is now a conspiracy, and in many cases the conspirators have admitted it themselves. There is simply no putting the genie back in the bottle. On both my science site and my art site, we have seen that all of Modern life is a transparent MATRIX, controlled with a huge web of lies, fudges, cheats, steals, subterfuges, false flags, misdirections, spy networks, and army of planted trolls and agents. But you don't have to read my papers to know that now: it has become so obvious and so pandemic even the mainstream is reporting on it. Your average citizen who reads nothing is becoming aware of the extent of the MATRIX, since you would have to be dead asleep not to be aware of it.
So we can see Hancock spinning the spin he was hired to spin in the first seconds of the interview. He is attacking the mainstream but is doing it with 16-ounce gloves on. They have told him they don't want to be hit in the face, so he aims all his weak punches at the chest. According to Hancock, contemporary science isn't corrupt, dogmatic, and closed, it is simply “people being people”:
We have a large number of dedicated, hardworking, committed scientific professionals. . . they feel they know what they are doing, like all scientists down through the ages, they have a reference frame that they work through which becomes their definition of reality and they find it very difficult to accept alternative points of view.
Whoa, Graham, rein it in, Buddy! Don't get all emotional and say something you might regret later!
As you can imagine, the mainstream loves being “attacked” like this. Through it all, they remain “dedicated scientific professionals” who, at worst, are a little shortsighted.
But in studying the theories of the mainstream, their salesmanship, and their responses to criticism, have we found that to be the case? Not even close. In archaeology, I can't cite chapter and verse, but in physics I can and have. Although some physicists in the middle levels may be dedicated and scientific, the field has been led in the 20th century by those who are neither. The theories have devolved into the worst sort of fudging mysticism, heavy with cloaking math, and any attempt to point out the obvious flaws and cheats in these theories is shouted down or suppressed with schoolyard tricks.
However, it was not any of this that unmasked Hancock for me. His opening comments didn't initially get a rise out of me. I cataloged them, of course, but no camel's back was broken by them. At first I dismissed the comments as just his attempt to appear fair and impartial and sober, blah, blah. This is always the sort of thing you hear on TV: a lot of politics posing as ideas. So it wasn't what led to this paper.
No, it was what he said in passing at the end of the interview that caused a wall to fall down with a crash. At minute 11:52, he says this:
Consciousness is the greatest mystery of science, and it is perhaps the scientific mystery that we most urgently need to solve. And we have at our disposal an array of natural substances at our disposal called the psychedelics which allow us to switch on and off altered states of consciousness at will—which are superb devices for exploring the mysteries of consciousness. And yet, for ideological reasons—and these reasons are totally ideological—the justification for them simply does not exist—but for ideological reasons we are prevented from doing so. And this is a cover for all sorts of other restrictions and controls on the freedom of the adult over his or her own body and over his or her own consciousness.
This hit me like a ton of bricks, because of course I have recently been studying the government operations of the 1960's against the hippies and anti-war protesters, in which the CIA and other agencies began pushing LSD on these groups to disorient them and marginalize them. Hancock is sounding like a more level-headed Tim Leary or Ram Dass here, although the drug of choice now would appear to be DMT instead of LSD.
This ties Hancock to Russell Brand, Rupert Sheldrake, and Daniel Pinchbeck, all of whom have apparently been recruited by Intelligence to lead the present operation of pushing drugs on the youth. Sheldrake was previously tied to Hancock since they have been lecturing together, selling the same line about “consciousness being the greatest mystery of science” and all that. They were both censored by TED as part of the same psy-op. But now the younger and hairier guys Brand and Pinchbeck have been added to the roster to bring in the young ladies and the dudes.
I have already outed Brand in a recent paper, showing you that he is being used to further suppress the vote. He is trying to convince the youth that voting is ineffectual, so they should just quit. I have also written about Sheldrake, showing you how he is also being used to control the opposition, leading those who are disenchanted with mainstream science into ever more mysticism. Although Sheldrake and I are both opposed to the mainstream, I am demanding science become mechanical again while Sheldrake is insisting it become even more mystical and fluffy than it already is. Basically, Sheldrake's job is capturing my readership—and the readership of all sensible people—and diverting it into ineffectual channels. The same can be said for Hancock, Brand, and Pinchbeck.
But even without this new drug-pushing agenda, the consciousness agenda was crap by itself. It simply isn't true that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science. Consciousness is the greatest mystery of brain science, but there are plenty of other mysteries in science that are just as big, and perhaps bigger. The thing about the consciousness mystery is that we aren't even close to solving it. Like the mystery of the universe's beginning or the mystery of life, it is just too big for us. But there are many mysteries we are capable of solving right now, which in my opinion makes them a lot more exciting than the ones we can't solve.
The reason they keep trying to sell you on these ones that are too big for us is that they are great places to camp out and blow smoke. They can't be proved wrong there, because there isn't enough data. So this is where all the top theorists (and the famous new-age guys) hang out. They avoid the solid problems I like to write about, because those problems require collating and explaining a lot of real data. Since they don't have the ability to do that, they prefer to hide out in black holes and the first seconds of the universe and in 11-dimensional math and in holograms and in consciousness, where you can spout all the nonsense you like.
The other thing they like about these problems that are too big for us is that they act as perfect misdirection. They want to divert you into these problems, since once you get in you can waste years of your life with nothing to show for it. They keep all the stupid people talking about sports and movie stars, but they know they can't interest you in that shit, so they have to come up with something more cerebral for you. It used to be manufactured Biblical or literary problems that diverted the intelligentsia, like how many angels danced on the head of a pin or how many hexameters Virgil could write without spilling a trochee. Now it is whether an imaginary astronaut will pass the event horizon of the black hole and get burned up or stretched to death. Armchair philosophy posing as science, in other words.
But why would they want you wasting all your braincells on this stuff? Because if you are reading and discussing black holes, the edge of the universe, 11-dimensional math, or the origins of consciousness, you aren't getting in their way. They have then successfully diverted you into sciolism. This is what all their “science” magazines are about. Those magazines no longer contain a jot of real science. Instead, they are written from various government cubicles to misdirect you into manufactured problems and controversies. While you are out beating their phantom bushes, they are free to do what they like in science, art, and government.
As more proof of this, let us analyze the 2012 video of Brand, Hancock, and Pinchbeck discussing various topics on youtube. Russell Brand is rather charming and funny, and I am certainly not here to deny it. That is why they recruited him. But he jumps almost immediately into propaganda. By minute 1:38 he is already selling mysticism by creating two enemies for it: atheism and the political right. Since I don't like either atheism or the political right, I should be part of his target audience, but unfortunately I see right through him. I can see he is trying to divert my fellow hippies back into navel gazing, experimenting with government-created lab drugs, and a new-age sort of faux-spiritualism based on total self-absorption, shallow subjectivity, and a science based on wish-fulfillment. In other words, the controllers are re-packaging the same thing they destroyed progressives with in the 1960's, updating it with new catchwords and conmen.
Then we hear from Pinchbeck. Who is Daniel Pinchbeck? Listen closely: his dad Peter Pinchbeck was an abstract painter in New York City and so was his father-in-law. His mother Joyce Johnson dated Jack Kerouac. Johnson has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and the Washington Post. She taught at Columbia University. Red flags popping up all over the place. If you don't know what I mean, pause here and read my paper on the Beat Generation. Then read my paper on the Stolen Century, from which you will learn a lot more in the same vein. Then return to this paper. If you don't have time for that, I will gloss it for you: Kerouac and all the Beats were tied to Military Intelligence, and all those magazines and newspapers that Johnson writes for are controlled by the same. What is more, abstract painting was controlled and promoted by the CIA, and the CIA admits it.
So that's who Daniel Pinchbeck is. I think you will admit that goes a long way to explaining why he seems to be doing the same thing Carlos Castaneda,* Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Alan Watts, and many others were doing decades ago. They were agents and it looks like he is, too.
For more indication of that, we find that Pinchbeck claims to have been influenced by Rudolph Steiner. This ties again to my paper on the Beats, because in that paper I not only expose the Beats, I also expose Theosophy. Steiner's Anthroposophy was just a spin-off of Theosophy.
We also find Pinchbeck promoting the theories of Terence McKenna, another red flag. McKenna was the main pusher of psychedelics in the decades between Tim Leary and Pinchbeck. McKenna predicted the end of the world in 2012 based on “novelty reading” of fractal patterns he claimed to have discovered in the I Ching. He was led to this discovery by his prophetic voice Logos. In this vein, Pinchbeck has claimed a foundation for his theories by telling us he receives prophecy directly from an entity that identifies itself as the MesoAmerican diety Quetzalcoatl. So this is who Graham Hancock is now hanging out with.
[Added, September 8, 2014: Last year, Gnostic Media uncovered a December 1994 lecture by McKenna at Esalen, where he admits he is an Intelligence agent. Here is what he said,
And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then they recruited me and said, “you know, with a mouth like yours there’s a place for you in our organization”. And I’ve worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I’ve been there to the present.
So Hancock is promoting Pinchbeck who is promoting McKenna who admitted he was an agent.]
Some readers will by now be pegging me as a tightass, but they should know I am all in favor of spiritualism, inspiration, serendipity, mystery, and so on. I don't think physics is the place for any of those things (except that I take inspiration wherever I can get it, with gratitude and without question); but I do see real evidence for them everywhere. I consider myself a hippie. My problem with all this isn't the mystery or the inspiration, it is the fact that I now know the hippie movement was infiltrated and taken over by Military Intelligence decades ago. I am all in favor of festivals, but the problem is I can see all the major hippie, alternative and New Age festivals are now fake. These festivals and movements are now organized and led by fake hippies and gurus planted by Intelligence, and job one for these people is keeping the hippies diverted. Daniel Pinchbeck, Russell Brand and the rest are selling you a new form of Tim Leary's old “turn on, tune in, drop out.” They are trying to convince you this is how the revolution will come about, because they know that it has the least chance of coming about that way. They are convincing current hippies that the world will be transformed by them sitting around in a circle holding hands and thinking good thoughts. It won't. Holding hands and thinking good thoughts is fine, and may be a good first step. But by itself it won't change anything. The revolution requires real action, and the controllers are doing everything they can to prevent any action.
That is where the drugs come in. The drugs keep you in an induced stupor, and in that stupor you mistake your ideas for reality. You think that just because you have imagined peace, peace has really happened. But the world doesn't work that way. Reality isn't a wish-fulfillment. It isn't a construct of the mind. It isn't a hologram you can rebuild from a happy thought. The hippies have to find some way to resist the bad people. These bad people exist in the real world and they are performing real actions. They will continue to perform them until they are stopped. They will not be stopped with meditation.
I am not suggesting violence. It may require an armed revolution and it may not. But it will certainly require positive action. It will begin with knowledge. You first have to unmask all these agents and drive around them. Once you do that you can see more clearly what to do next.
But let's return to the youtube video. We saw Brand passing the microphone to Pinchbeck. Within a minute of Pinchbeck's droning, Brand is already having to fake interest. He is having to work hard to keep his eyes from peeling back in his head. From the look on his face, I read, “Lord, was it worth it? Is what I am being paid to be here propping up this asshole worth it?” Even Pinchbeck sees that, and by minute 3:30 he is signaled from offstage to pass the mic back to Brand before the audience dozes off or Brand falls over backwards in his chair. Brand takes back the mic with an obviously facetious, “Bloody Hell!” He begins by mentioning the “pervasive cynicism” in the media. But like Chomsky and his Manufacturing Consent theories, Brand stops short of telling us where that cynicism comes from. Both Chomsky and Brand tell us the media is to blame. Neither point out the obvious, which is that the media is controlled by the government, and directly by the CIA. The cynicism isn't an accident: it is a government program. As such, it could be stopped with a single decision. If the government decided to stop promoting cynicism, it would end tomorrow. But the cynicism suits them fine, since it is the ultimate guarantee of inaction.
Brand does hint slyly at this inaction, but he doesn't explain how psychedelics are going to help overcome such inaction. Psychedelics are hardly known for their promotion of political action. Psychedelics may or may not promote a form of awareness, but even in the case they do, they only promote an awareness of a general interconnectedness. That sort of awareness tends to cause inaction rather than action. It puts you back in the lap of god, where you aren't required to do anything but sigh contently, like a cat purring in the arms of its master. In such a state, mass murders and general corruption and impending doom no longer register.
Despite that, these guys continue to sell DMT as the answer to all your problems. Brand says that shamanic experience doesn't have the immediacy of a line of coke or a blowjob, and Pinchbeck leans in and says “try DMT and we can talk after that.” Everybody has a good belly laugh and then, amazingly, Brands says, “He's openly endorsing drugs to a recovering drug addict.”
Yes, that's exactly what all these guys are doing. Our entire culture is a recovering drug addict, and here these “scientists” and “intellectuals” are pushing a new drug on him.
Also notice that it would appear Brand hasn't actually tried the psychedelics they are pushing on the rest of us. They can pay him to be the funny front man, but not to actually eat the tainted food.
Pinchbeck then grabs the mic again and quotes Gandhi to the effect that the point of life is to live more simply. Fine, but again, how do psychedelics fit in there? I don't remember Gandhi encouraging us to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” I don't remember Gandhi pushing drugs on us. I don't remember Gandhi recommending political apathy and inaction, in the name of simplifying life.
Pinchbeck then quotes Gandhi again, recommending renunciation. Brand doesn't want to renounce sex and drugs, so Pinchbeck says they only have to renounce wealth. No follow up on that from Brand, but someone in the audience should have stood up and pointed out that we have two rich guys talking about renouncing wealth. Yes, and when exactly are they going to start doing that? Are they going to start by renouncing their paycheck from Intelligence directly after the interview?
Then Brand takes back the microphone and says [minute 7:25] that our generation has become one that has been “accidentally marketed to.” What? What was accidental about the marketing, exactly? All the commercials and advertisements were an accident? “No one intended to advertise, it just sort of happened. We woke up one morning and all these ads appeared on our desks. We tried to sweep them off into the trash, but a gust of wind caught them and floated them over to the TV stations, where they just appeared fortuitously before and after episodes of American Idol.”
Brand then asks Pinchbeck how we can “change the paradigm.” Of course Pinchbeck has no answer except more drug pushing, but Brand asked him the wrong question. Brand should have asked Pinchbeck, “How can we change the paradigm by continuing the same old paradigm? How can we expect any progress if all we do is repackage the 1960's CIA drug-pushing paradigm of Tim Leary? Hasn't this paradigm of psychedelics already been tried? Didn't it already fail spectacularly for the hippies? The only way it succeeded is viewed from the 'atheistic and far right' government, which used the psychedelics to tame the hippies and other progressives.”
You won't believe what Pinchbeck says next [minute 9:00]:
[In order to create change] we need to actually utilize some of the techniques of propaganda and marketing to turn them around. Maybe the same instruments and tools that have been used to keep people in slavery and ignorance can be used to liberate and awaken them.
Brand is clearly dumbfounded, saying only “yes”. He has to go along with this, but you can tell he can't believe this was the wording chosen. He actually covers his mouth and crosses his arms, to try to hide his disbelief at the crashing stupidity of this entire interview. He is probably thinking, “Guys! Was it wise to use the word 'propaganda' in the middle of a long spate of transparent propaganda?” What he should have been thinking is this: why use propaganda to turn them around? Wouldn't the truth work better? Supposing we really wanted to change course, surely the most efficient method would be a return to truth.
Finally, at minute 13:30, Graham Hancock pops in from the audience to tell us that language is very important regarding drugs. He says that the word “drug” is usually connected to the word “abuse,” and that there is no idea of using drugs responsibly in our culture.
Again, WHAT? Is he serious? Primetime TV in the US has been taken over by drug commercials, and not one of them ever mentions the word abuse, or considers the possibility of it. This is the most drug- saturated culture in history, and almost everyone doing drugs thinks they are doing so responsibly. They have their doctor's seal of approval, to convince them they aren't just dope fiends.
Hancock then assures us that the DMT experience has nothing in common with the heroin experience, and that the hallucinogens are very effective in removing people from more dangerous drugs. But this is just a more subtle form of drug pushing. Hancock has clearly been recruited for his voice and mien, which resonate with soberness and trust and good intentions. He hasn't snowed me, though. I know that like other drugs, DMT is consciousness-altering. And like other drugs, it has serious side-effects, many of them long-term. This is why you can normally tell when people have taken hallucinogens. They lose natural speed and clarity of thought, and I don't mean just when they are tripping. They lose these things permanently. They aren't what they were before. They also lose a natural spread of emotions. Which gets us into why Intelligence has promoted them all along.
Hallucinogens promote acceptance and resignation. It could be argued they promote or cause pervasive apathy, if not pervasive cynicism. Regardless, we know the government didn't just “accidentally market” LSD to the hippies and anti-war protesters in the 1960's. Those who created the drugs in the government labs knew what the drugs did to the mind, and they wanted to promote that response in a targeted segment of the population. They are still targeting that segment, and you may be part of it.
Hancock then repeats the old saw that the government has spent billions in the war against drugs, trying to keep illegal drugs away from the population. He says 750,000 Americans are arrested every year for possession of cannabis. But we now know that is all propaganda. Even if they are true, they don't mean what Hancock says they mean. Those numbers don't mean the government is trying to stop the drug trade, it just means they are trying to profit from both ends of it. They spend billions of dollars pushing drugs in the illegal markets—which we know the government ultimately controls—and then spend billions from the treasury in the fake war on drugs. You will say that if they spent the money, they didn't also make the money, but you are missing the bigger picture. Any money spent is made by someone. In fact, it is your money they spend: taxdollars. They spend it by paying the salaries at DEA and FBI and ATF and local police. Then they incarcerate these drug offenders in private prisons, paying the salaries there and making huge profits for the owners and investors of these prisons. So for many reasons the government has no interest in stopping the drug trade. Just the reverse. It is the largest black market in the world, and black markets are no longer controlled by mobs and mafias. They are controlled by your governments and banks.
For this reason, the government would love to create another black market in DMT, and this is how they are choosing to do it. These guys are their pointmen. If the government really didn't want to see a trade in illegal drugs, it wouldn't allow these prominent people to push them. These guys act like promoting illegal activity is free speech, but it isn't and never was. It is only allowed because they are working for the man. They aren't low-level users, they are high-level pushers, so they get a pass.
Hancock then tries to push DMT as a human rights issue. He says we have the right to do what we wish with our bodies, even regarding addictive drugs, and that the state has no right to intervene. Again, he is trying to appeal to your progressive nature by misdirecting you into non-central arguments. Up to a point, I agree with him, but as we have seen, that isn't the question here. The question is whether you wish to take drugs pushed on you by the government and its agents, listening to their propaganda even as they tell you it is propaganda. Do you wish to be that stupid? I don't. Do you wish to ignore what hallucinogens did to your father's generation and your grandfather's generation? Do you wish to ignore the history of LSD as a weapon against the hippies and the anti-war movement? I don't.
I also don't wish to watch anymore of that youtube video. It bores me. So I will conclude this paper by taking you back to the RT interview of Hancock by Abby Martin. Knowing what you now know, you should ask why RT is willingly promoting a US or British asset. Why is Russian Television promoting US propaganda? You may think Putin is happy to see us undermine ourselves, and is simply facilitating our societal dissolution, but it is much deeper than that. The truth is, Russia and the US have been allies all along. Putin is just our man in Russia, as Kim Jong-un is our man in North Korea and Gaddafi was our man in Libya. People think the book 1984 was warning us about the future, but it was simply telling us about the present. The enemies are all manufactured, for the purpose of military spending and the two-minutes hate. Russia is our controlled opposition and we are theirs. Nothing is going on in Ukraine right now but an expensive movie, broadcast to both sides. Without these yearly wars, how do you think they would justify their trillion-dollar “defense” budgets?
* For a recent exposé on Castaneda from, of all places, Salon.com, you may go here.