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Joe Rogan Experience #1124 - Robert Schoch

Robert Schoch is an associate professor of Natural Sciences at the College of General Studies, Boston University. He has been best known as a proponent of the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis. Check out links to more of his work at http://robertschoch.com

Joe RoganhostRobert Schochguest
May 31, 20182h 54mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 3:53

    Why Schoch’s Sphinx work mattered: bringing a fringe idea into public view

    1. JR

      Ready? Five, four, three, two, one. Mr. Schoch, first of all, thank you very, very, very much for being here.

    2. RS

      Oh-

    3. JR

      I've been following your work for a long time now, and, uh, I'm, I'm very appreciative of you and very appreciative of everything you've done. And I've been fascinated by the subject of ancient Egypt, so I'm, um, I really, I'm really psyched, very psyched to have you here.

    4. RS

      Well, thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here. I've, I've heard a lot about your show. I've heard a lot about you. My, um, of course the late John Anthony West, I think was on with you a couple of times, maybe?

    5. JR

      Yeah, yeah.

    6. RS

      He was very proud that I guess you did the only full Skype interview with him. (laughs)

    7. JR

      Yeah, that's the only one I've ever done is with him.

    8. RS

      Yeah, he used to like to talk about that, so...

    9. JR

      (laughs) Well, I just had to talk to him, and, you know, he was in Upstate New York at the time, and it was just, he really didn't have any plans to come down here. And, um, I just, I was very fortunate to one day get him in studio, though. It was really nice.

    10. RS

      Yeah, yeah.

    11. JR

      So, it's been wonderful.

    12. RS

      Well, his work, um, that DVD series that he did, Magical Egypt-

    13. JR

      It was re- it was amazing.

    14. RS

      Yeah.

    15. JR

      And I'd seen your work before that in that Mysteries of the Sphinx thing that was narrated by Charlton Heston.

    16. RS

      Charlton Heston, NBC 1993.

    17. JR

      Yeah.

    18. RS

      I think in many ways it was the Mystery of the Sphinx that really broke everything open, brought everything to the public attention. I've had many people tell me... I'm not trying to brag or anything, I'm just saying factually-

    19. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    20. RS

      ... that this really opened up a new field, if we could put it that way, a new, um, you know, way of looking at things in the popular, among the popular, um, public.

    21. JR

      Yeah.

    22. RS

      You know, press, the popular media, the... But people around the world, versus the academic scholarly journals and the back and forth, that type of thing. You have to remember, I'm a faculty member. I'm at Boston University, I'm an academic. Uh, and many of the academics have pooh-poohed, should we say, over the years, bringing things to the public. But I think it's been important to do.

    23. JR

      Now, what we're talking about for the people that are uninformed is the idea that some of the structures in ancient Egypt are far older than conventional wisdom or conventional modern-day archeology, modern-day Egyptologists, they would like us to believe that all of this spawned from a very specific time period. And people like John Anthony West and yourself and some other folks like Graham Hancock are proposing that it's entirely possible that there were many different eras of construction in Egypt, and that there are some structures that are far, far older than we think.

    24. RS

      Yeah, exactly. And this, what I was alluding to is this really opened up with our work on redating the Great Sphinx.

    25. JR

      Yes.

    26. RS

      And I think you know the story, but maybe just to summarize in the l- smallest of nutshells, John Anthony West, before I met him, he was, became a follower, should we say. I shouldn't say follower, because that sounds wrong. That sounds like it's a religion dogma. But he became interested in the work of the late Schwaller de Lubicz, who died, passed away in 1961. But he had mentioned in, uh, one line that the Sphinx had been weathered by rain. I would say precipitation, as a geologist, not wind and sand. So this, if it were true, and it is true, would put the Sphinx back to a much earlier period, which would tie in with Schwaller's work and John Anthony West's subsequent work that there were indications that dynastic Egypt as we know it, going back to about 3000 BC, was really a legacy of what I call now an earlier cycle of civilization. Uh, something that goes back much, much earlier, which at this point I date back to the end of the last Ice Age. Ice Age ended 9700 BC, just to put it in perspective for people.

  2. 3:53 – 7:53

    How Schoch got involved: from skeptic to investigator in Egypt (1989–1990)

    1. JR

      So when y- when did you first get on board with this?

    2. RS

      I-

    3. JR

      Did John Anthony West come to you or...

    4. RS

      John Anthony West, okay, so the story goes this way. John Anthony West published Serpent in the Sky, his probably most famous book, first edition 1979. He was then looking for someone that could really validate or at least assess, from a scientific point of view, this theory about the Sphinx, which he had just barely sort of touched the surface based on Schwaller that maybe it could be older, but this was really a geological question. He mentions that in 1979 in Serpent in the Sky. John Anthony West went on to become very involved with Egypt, and he started traveling to Egypt, he led tours to Egypt. He wrote The Traveler's Key to Ancient Egypt in 1985, also mentions in Appendix, I think it was, just the, quote, "Older Sphinx Theory," but really looking for someone to at least assess it scientifically. He met a fellow at, in, um, in Egypt actually, at the time, Robert Eddy, who is a PhD English literature, I believe, something like that. But he was teac- teaching in Cairo, American University in Cairo, I believe. Then he came to Boston University. This is late 1980s. I was, and still do, teach at Boston University full time. Robert Eddy and myself got to know each other. Robert Eddy mentioned me as a geologist to John Anthony West, and that maybe this was someone who seems fairly knowledgeable, fairly open-minded about things, you know?

    5. JR

      Now, at the time, did you have any thoughts-

    6. RS

      Not liberal.

    7. JR

      ... on Egypt or the-

    8. RS

      Oh, I, I, I-

    9. JR

      ... the dating?

    10. RS

      My interest in Egypt goes way back. I was reading about ancient Egypt when I was literally 6, 7, 8 years old. I had a grandmother who had a wonderful library at the time. And I would go through her library. She had books from the British Museum on ancient Egypt going back to the turn of the century. So I, I was...... prepared in the sense I was open to such things, but I didn't imagine getting involved in Egypt in any way professionally.

    11. JR

      Did you have any thoughts about the dating of the Sphinx or the Pyramids-

    12. RS

      Well-

    13. JR

      ... or anything back then-

    14. RS

      Well, yeah.

    15. JR

      ... before you looked into it?

    16. RS

      Yeah, there were, there were two things. So, there were two things going on in my head back then, which maybe prepped me for this. Number one, I knew the conventional story. I knew that the Sphinx goes back to 2500 BC, according to the standard Egyptologists. In 1989, which is when I first, I believe it was 1989, I first actually met West in person. I had in my mind that the Egyptologists must be correct because they've studied it. They must know what they're doing. I was coming from an academic point of view. I, um, I'm not... I'm just giving, you know, saying where I'm coming from.

    17. JR

      Right.

    18. RS

      I had gone to Yale University to get my PhD in geology and geophysics. I was very well-grounded in, quote, "The status quo academic point of view." So, I thought when I wou- first went to Egypt, I would just prove West wrong. I would just prove that the Egyptologists knew what they were talking about. But, and this is important, but, I was also trained in many ways, both as a graduate student and going back to my grandmother, who I had great respect for, and was also very, should we say, liberal and open-minded, but critical. You always have to follow the evidence wherever it goes, and that's always been my rule of thumb, that not everything is always the way people say it is, even if they're, uh, quote, "Authorities." And something I already knew when I went to Egypt for the first time, was that some of the very old Egyptologists in the late 19th, early 20th century had actually suggested that just the way it looks, the feel of the Sphinx, not based

  3. 7:53 – 10:39

    Theosophy, open-minded skepticism, and following evidence over authority

    1. RS

      on hard evidence, really, that maybe it was older than the pyramids. That maybe it goes back earlier. So, I felt that it wasn't all said and done and, you know, pat and sound that the Egyptologists necessarily knew what they were talking about in modern times, because some of the earlier Egyptologists, who they held in very high respect supposedly, had said different things. Secondly, and I hate to bring this up, but I will because it's part of the background, I... my grandmother, who I mentioned a second ago, uh, was a Theosophist, and Theo- if you know anything about Theosophy, it also suggests that, you know, maybe there's things that go back earlier. I don't do-

    2. JR

      What is a Theosophist?

    3. RS

      A Theosophist, it's, it's, uh... (sighs) How do I explain it? Y- have you heard of Blavatsky, Madame Blavatsky?

    4. JR

      No.

    5. RS

      No? Okay. Whoa, I'm losing my (laughs) headphones.

    6. JR

      (laughs) .

    7. RS

      Um, Theosophy was founded in the late 19th century. It questioned a lot of the materialistic values, a lot of the dogma of science of the time, of religion of the time. It looked to the East in particular, to other philosophies, other worldviews. So basically, it was a way, this is what it did for me at least, and I'm not a Theosophist. I don't wanna say I'm a Theosophist. Uh, but reading Theosophical works, on top of everything else, allowed me, I think, to expand my horizons and to see that maybe this dogma of the day is just that, the dogma of the day. That there are other possibilities.

    8. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    9. RS

      And not that we accept something just because someone said it or because it's old or because it's this religion or that-

    10. JR

      Right.

    11. RS

      ... religion or that's supposed to be ancient culture. But no, you keep everything open. You look at the evidence, and that's really where I was coming from. But my point is that even in the late 1980s, early 1990s when I first got involved with this, if I looked at it critically, the evidence was not that definitive for the age of the Sphinx. So, I was going in with open-minded possibilities, but honestly when I first went to Egypt with John Anthony West in 1990, I thought before I got off the plane that this would be simple, open-and-shut case. I would prove him wrong in the sense of his assertions that maybe the Sphinx was older. I had no doubt at the time that my colleagues in Egyptology must know what they're talking about, and all of that changed literally within 30, without exaggerating, 30 to 120 seconds of first seeing the Sphinx.

    12. JR

      Really?

    13. RS

      Yeah, it really did. It really did.

  4. 10:39 – 12:11

    Geology of the Sphinx: precipitation erosion, enclosure walls, and what it implies

    1. JR

      What was your first impression?

    2. RS

      Because my first impression of the Sphinx was, now that I saw it on the ground, in person, there was something wrong with the Egyptological dating. Because when you look at the Sphinx, as a geologist with a geological eye, this was not weathered by wind and sand. This was not desert erosion and weathering that I saw on the Sphinx, the body of the Sphinx, which is very difficult to tell because it's been heavily repaired and reworked, but particularly on the walls of what are known as the Sphinx Enclosure. The Sphinx Enclosure is important because it preserves a lot of the details, and if you haven't, if the audience has not been to Egypt, they should realize that when they carved the Sphinx, it's all solid bedrock. Only the head initially was above the ground's surface. You carve, they carved down into the rock to free up the body, what I call the core body of the Sphinx. And it's that core body and the walls of the enclosure, more or less the quarry around it, if you wanna use that term, that show these ancient weathering, precipitation, erosional features that are incompatible with the last 5,000 years of climatic history on the eastern edge of the Sahara. So, immediately I knew there was something wrong geologically. Had to figure that out. Either this was a weird geological anomaly-...

  5. 12:11 – 15:53

    Engineering context: the Sphinx Temple/Valley Temple and massive limestone blocks

    1. RS

      or something else was going on and the Sphinx might go back to an earlier period. Also, I wanna point out that when you look at the Sphinx, and other geologists have looked at this as well, they did not just chip away at the rock to carve the body. More or less, you could've chipped away th- at the rock with pickaxes and that type of thing, shoveled out chips of rock in baskets. That would've been the easy way. What they did is they carved out huge blocks of stone, and when I say huge, we're talking multi-ton, tens of tons, some of them may be over 50 tons or more, of limestone. They moved those due east of the Sphinx and built what is now known as the Sphinx Temple, which is still there in ruinous condition, and the Valley Temple. So you had these two huge temples, and what is interesting, a lot of people don't realize this or they don't think about, I think those constructions which are contemporary with the oldest portion of the Sphinx in some ways are more impressive if you think about the technology and wha- went into constructing them than the age of the Sphinx itself. So it's not just the Sphinx, it's also these limestone temples that are associated with it and were built contemporaneously.

    2. JR

      So Jamie pulled up two photos here. The f- the first one that he pulled up was a computer image that showed the Sphinx and showed, uh-

    3. RS

      Okay, I'm looking at it now.

    4. JR

      Yeah.

    5. RS

      Yes. And, um, in this image, what you can see, that's a computer image that's actually from Mystery of the Sphinx, and then there's a inset that's a aerial photograph, the real thing. And that shows how when they were carving the body, they cut out huge blocks and then put them in position to make what's known as the Sphinx Temple due east of the Sphinx.

    6. JR

      And the second image is the Sphinx Temple? Okay, it's here.

    7. RS

      Okay, and you, you look at this, it says "The Sphinx faces due east, the rising sun..." and right in front of it is the Sphinx Temple. So this is a humongous temple made out of these huge blocks of stone which were carved out when they carved the body of the Sphinx. And here you see, in this image, another, uh, picture of the Sphinx Temple.

    8. JR

      And so these erosion features...

    9. RS

      And you can see how big they are.

    10. JR

      ...that you're looking at here...

    11. RS

      You can see how big they are.

    12. JR

      Yes, enormous.

    13. RS

      They're enormous. Okay, these erosion features on the blocks, don't worry about them for the moment.

    14. JR

      Okay.

    15. RS

      Let's go back to the Sphinx enclosure itself. It's a Sphinx enclosure where you see the rolling, undulating profile, the erosional features. Here you see it in that picture, the vertical fissures. And I know you're familiar with this personally-

    16. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    17. RS

      ... 'cause I've heard you talk about it with John Anthony West.

    18. JR

      Yes.

    19. RS

      That can only be caused by precipitation. The rocks are like a layer cake, so it takes out the softer layers, it recedes, um, the softer layers. Some of the harder layers stick out further, but the water also finds its way down crevices and cracks, natural features that are slightly, um, softer, and it forms these vertical fissures. I wanna make the point, because a lot of people get confused, they say, "Couldn't it be rising Nile floods?" No. Geologically, that would give a very different signature on the rock. It's not floods coming up from the bottom. It's actually precipitation and rainfall runoff coming from above and I'm-

    20. JR

      And rainfall for thousands of years?

    21. RS

      Well, there's two aspects here. It could be thousands of years, it could be much stronger rainfall, you know, huge flash floods, that type of thing. And part of the story that I hope we'll get to is that initially... I'm jumping around here a little bit.

    22. JR

      No worries.

  6. 15:53 – 19:47

    A new catastrophe model: 9700 BC solar outburst, climate whiplash, and the "SIDA" concept

    1. RS

      Um, but initially I was thinking 5 to 7000 BC. That was very conservative based on the geological data, based on the seismic, which we have to get to also. But now I believe we're talking prior to 9700 BC for the original construction of the Sphinx. And we can talk about why the dating. And at 9700 BC, we have the end of the Younger Dryas, the end of the glacial epoch, the end of the last Ice Age. I have now put together the story based on evidence. And when I ever s- I say, if I say I believe something or I think something, it's always based on evidence that I've been piecing together, that what we had ending the Younger Dryas, ending the last Ice Age was a huge eruption from the sun, a huge solar outburst, huge climatic changes which put, among other things, a lot of precipitation, a lot of moisture into the air, which came down as precipitation with huge floods, huge, um, essentially thunderstorms, et cetera. And I think a lot of the initial erosion that we still see on the walls of the Sphinx enclosure go back to that period. So you had the situation where you would get this incredible weathering and erosion, and then it continued for thousands of years after that and was reinforced until you had the Sahara coming in, in relatively recent times, in geologically Holocene times, about 5000-

    2. JR

      The Sahara Desert, you mean?

    3. RS

      The Sahara Desert, yes.

    4. JR

      So, before that, it was some sort of a rainforest?

    5. RS

      Uh, a savanna to rainforest. It actually varied over time. And before that, it was very, um, fertile savanna, lots of plants there. People have seen it even in popular movies and whatnot how the Sahara at one point had water and all kinds of animals. That's before the end of the last Ice Age, before this, these incredible changes that we have in 9700 BC. So that's where, um, the Sphinx, I think, the original Sphinx goes back to that time period. And that's what the Egyptians called Zep Tepi. This was a first time for them, or what I call an earlier cycle of civilization. The last cycle, the one that we're still part of, in my terminology, is the last 5,000 years. So civilization arising-... re-emerging, I should say, about 3000 to 4000 BC, coming to really what we have now, you know, high technology, et cetera. But before that, there had been an earlier cycle of civilization that was essentially snuffed out, or brought to its knees, if you would, by the end of the last Ice Age. And just to m- map this out, a period from about 9700 BC, this is what I'm reconstructing now, to about 4000 to 3000 BC where we have civilization re-emerging. Between that period, so thousands of years, 9700 BC to, say, 3700 BC, for round numbers, 6000 years, we have essentially a dark period and what I've been now calling SIDA, solar-induced dark age. Sort of ironic, the sun would induce a dark age because it brought civilization back to an earlier stage, if you would.

    6. JR

      I'm- I'm not sure I follow that. Wh- how did the sun do this?

    7. RS

      Um, solar outburst. Essentially, coronal mass ejection-

    8. JR

      Right.

    9. RS

      ... huge eruption, bigger than anything we've ever seen on Earth and-

    10. JR

      And so that's what caused these massive thundershowers and we-

    11. RS

      Exactly, it-

    12. JR

      ... nothing in modern history is any remem-

    13. RS

      Nothing in modern history is even close to this, but we do have isotope data, et cetera, that indicates this has happened in the past, at the end of the last Ice Age, and I'm sure it's happened many times over.

    14. JR

      Mmm.

  7. 19:47 – 30:22

    Comet impact vs solar event: lightning, plasma effects, and missing craters

    1. RS

      And you have a lot of markers that indicate this. You have vitrification of rock. Um, in fact, a lot of the markers, and I- I don't wanna be debating the issue necessarily, but a lot of the markers that, uh, people have used for a comet at the Younger Dryas or during the Younger Dryas, really most of them are at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, that's what they're claiming, but a lot of the- the... A lot of the dating is very, very iffy.

    2. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    3. RS

      Um, I- I found it interesting, for instance, someone will use something as a marker for the Younger Dryas and it will give a date of 12,000 plus or minus 4,000 years, so, you know, this is just the way geology is. But I remember, and I can't remember his name. You had a guest on one of your shows. Uh, he was when, um, uh-

    4. JR

      Randall Carlson?

    5. RS

      Not Randall Carlson. Uh, I know Randall very well. Uh, he was on with Carlson and Schirmer and... Uh, but he came on by Skype.

    6. JR

      Yes.

    7. RS

      Malcolm? Malcolm...

    8. JR

      I do not remember his name.

    9. RS

      Okay. But anyway-

    10. JR

      Yeah.

    11. RS

      ... he was one of the people that was, quote, "comet proponent", and he started pointing it out, a lot of the evidence, uh, microspherules, um, glassy spheres, uh, nanodiamonds.

    12. JR

      Yes.

    13. RS

      I- I don't think he mentioned, but I'll mention it, shocked quartz, et cetera.

    14. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    15. RS

      And everyone has been assuming this has to be from a physical impact in the sense of something coming down, like a comet or a asteroid, that type of thing. But the problem is you don't necessarily find craters, you don't f- necessarily find the pieces of the comet. You should find some physical remains. And he mentioned, and I found it very interesting, he mentioned in passing what I've been working on now for a number of years, that no... And I was once on the comet bandwagon, I'll put it that way, and I'm not trying to knock good research. But when you look at the evidence, what is not being considered by a lot of people, and he mentioned this, is in passing he said, "Well, you know, something else that could cause this is lightning." But you wouldn't have lightning, you know, that's very localized. We think of-

    16. JR

      Oh, that's interesting.

    17. RS

      ... this as very localized.

    18. JR

      Right.

    19. RS

      Um, but if you have a major solar outburst, major coronal mass ejections, and, uh, astrophysicist who's now deceased, he was at Cornell, Thomas Gold, who did a lot of really good, in fact prize-winning work in astrophysics, first pointed out in the 1960s that if you have a major solar outburst, major coronal mass ejection, you would get essentially huge, what would be, like, huge lightning strikes over incredible areas of the Earth simultaneously. Um, this would cause vitrification, it would cause all these features.

    20. JR

      Wow.

    21. RS

      And just as of within the last year, there's been more work done showing that fulgurites, where lightning strikes in modern times, even small lightning strikes like that can cause, can create things like shocked quartz, other, quote, "impact features" that people have always said, "Well, it must be a comet or a- asteroid."

    22. JR

      Mmm.

    23. RS

      But you're not finding the craters, you're not finding other things. So what I'm finding, uh, in my own research, um, is I'm coming to conclude that it wasn't a physical object that hit us, it was a solar outburst. That's the general term I use for it.

    24. JR

      Is it possible that it was both?

    25. RS

      Um, actually, there's... It's quite possible that... It could have been both, yeah. There could have been fragments of both. I- I can address that. Um, and there's a couple of aspects to both. When you say both, there is indications that comets diving into the sun actually cause coronal mass ejections that correlate it with-

    26. JR

      Oh, wow.

    27. RS

      ... disturbing the sun. So in some cases you'll have the, I'll call it the comet group, talking about how we go through these comet streams periodically. I agree 100%. In fact, I talk about this in some of my early books, because I really was into comets at the time, Voyages of the Pyramid Builders, for instance, I talk about how comets might have begun and ended the Younger Dryas. But I wasn't thinking about solar activity at that time, seriously, as no one else was. But we now find that comets diving into the sun when we go through comet streams, that can set off solar activity. So, in fact, I think it could be both, but it could be that the comets are affecting the sun, which is then affecting the Earth, rather than directly, if that makes sense.

    28. JR

      Mmm, yes, okay.

    29. RS

      Um, and the other thing is that people have to understand there's a couple of things going on. The Younger Dryas, 10,900 BC, when it first begins, is a cooling period. It's not as dramatic a climate change as you have at 9700 BC, when all of a sudden we go from deep Ice Age climatic regime to...... modern or even a little bit warmer initially, um, modern changes. And-

    30. JR

      So this is it up here?

  8. 30:22 – 32:40

    Carrington Event as warning: modern vulnerability to solar storms

    1. RS

      Power grids. Power grids will be fried. There was a-

    2. JR

      Oof.

    3. RS

      And I think we're seeing the beginning of this, or we saw the beginning of this, because again, I'm a geologist, so I think in broad terms few hundred years is nothing. 1859-... are you aware of the Carrington Event?

    4. JR

      No.

    5. RS

      There was a major solar outburst, from a human perspective, major solar outburst, from a astrophysical perspective it was nothing. But it was a coronal mass ejection, actually two in a row that hit us in 1859. It's known as the Carrington Event after Richard Carrington who, um, first saw the solar flares, the really bright solar flares that were associated with it. It was picked up on the primitive magnetometers of the time that they had, for instance, in London, et cetera, studied by the physicists of the time. And 1859, there were electronics around. It was called the telegraph system. The telegraph system acted as huge antennae that picked up the s- changing magnetic fields, generated electricity along it, burnt out the telegraph lines, literally set telegraph, um, uh, s- uh, you know, the places where the telegraph operators worked on fire, telegraph stations on fire.

    6. JR

      Wow.

    7. RS

      That type of thing. Um, if we had a Carrington-level event now, which is really quite minor from a astrophysical perspective, orders of magnitude less than what happened at the end of the last Ice Age, uh, it would fry our grid lines, it would, um, knock out all the huge transformers. It would... Before it did that, bec- as it's coming in, it would probably knock out all the satellites, uh, the GPS systems, communications. I mean, it would really bring us to our knees as a technological society.

    8. JR

      Is this an article, Jamie? Yeah. From 1859. I can read that.

    9. RS

      Yeah, yeah.

    10. JR

      "The auroral display in Boston. There was another display of auroral."

    11. RS

      Yeah.

    12. JR

      Uh, "So bright-"

    13. RS

      Yeah. There you go.

    14. JR

      "... and brilliant. At one o'clock, ordinary print can be read by the light." Wow.

    15. RS

      Exactly. Because one thing you get is these bright auroras, these bright, what people think of as northern and southern lights, but in 1859, they saw them around the world.

    16. JR

      Mm-hmm.

  9. 32:40 – 38:31

    Plasma "gods in the sky": auroras, global petroglyph motifs, and Peratt’s experiments

    1. RS

      Um, back at the end of the last Ice Age, because they were so powerful, when they become more intense, they take on very discrete structures in the sky. Here's some-

    2. JR

      Mm.

    3. RS

      ... uh, what are known as s- again, northern lights-

    4. JR

      Right.

    5. RS

      ... auroral displays. But see how it starts to take on a discrete structure on the right there? And to describe it to the audience, do you see how it sort of looks like a person with their hands up in the air?

    6. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    7. RS

      They start to take on more and more discrete structures. Some of them look like people with their hands up in the air and little legs and some of them-

    8. JR

      And what exactly is this phenomenon?

    9. RS

      ... take on birds' heads. Um, this is basically the high-charged particles, electrons and protons and whatnot, interacting with the atmosphere. Um, and they form these figures. It's electrical phenomenon.

    10. JR

      Right.

    11. RS

      Uh, and they will ultimately come down, if you have an intense enough one, as you did at the end of the last Ice Age, it'll look like if you were there living, you know, 12,000 years ago, 10,000... 11,700 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age and you saw this, you would see these things in the sky-

    12. JR

      Like gods.

    13. RS

      Oh, they looked like gods. They looked like stick figure humans in the sky.

    14. JR

      Right.

    15. RS

      Uh, you would see huge lightning bolts hitting s- parts of the surface of the Earth.

    16. JR

      Oh, that, that image is fascinating 'cause that image, um, that's, uh, in hieroglyphics and all sorts of stuff.

    17. RS

      Exactly.

    18. JR

      Wow.

    19. RS

      You find this around the world. And Anthony Peratt, who's a lot-

    20. JR

      Explain what we're looking at b- for the people that are... 'cause a lot of people are just listening.

    21. RS

      Okay. What we're looking at is-

    22. JR

      Plasma discharge formation.

    23. RS

      Yeah, this is plasma discharge formation. Plasma is essentially, think of as electrically charged particles, electrons, protons, that type of thing.

    24. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    25. RS

      As it comes off the sun, in this case, think of a coronal mass ejection, a huge ball of charged gas is one way to describe it, hitting the atmosphere, driving down into the atmosphere, causing these, like, northern lights on steroids, if you wanna put it that way.

    26. JR

      And the images that we're seeing-

    27. RS

      But it takes on very specific images that look like stick figures.

    28. JR

      Right.

    29. RS

      So, these are things you would see in the sky, except they're, in many cases, they're spinning electrically. You wouldn't notice that they were spinning necessarily.

    30. JR

      Go back, Jamie.

  10. 38:31 – 43:59

    Survival, underground shelters, and cultural bottlenecks after catastrophe

    1. RS

      Yeah, our perspective, and there's more to it than that. You would have incredible radiation levels at the surface of the Earth. Paulo Violeta, a physicist I know, and he's published on this, has talked about how during an event like this, you would have levels of radiation that were so high that large mammals, we are ma- large mammals, large mammals, if they couldn't protect themselves, they could die within, you know, three to six, seven days, a week or so. How do you protect yourself? You go underground, you go into caves, you go into places, because rock will protect you from the surface radiation under these circumstances.

    2. JR

      Wow.

    3. RS

      Now, you don't need to stay there forever. You can, you know... Because these solar events probably came, now, this is hypothetical because we've not experienced a huge one like this, but they probably came, um, and then it would back off a little bit, but then maybe another one would come. I, again, I'm a geologist, so think of a huge earthquake and then aftershocks, aftershocks that can actually last centuries or millennia in some cases, you know, smaller ones. So, something that was happening, and you see this around the world too, is that where people survived, I believe, in part, because they had access to natural caves initially, then they built underground structures for when they came again, and it also encouraged or, uh, developed this whole tradition, should we say, of having a place to go, even if it's not occurring at the moment. They knew that these things do occur, um, at least for some thousands of years, and were aware of this, so were being prepared. Analogy I would use is during the Cold War here, what did a lot of people build in their backyards?

    4. JR

      Bunkers, yeah.

    5. RS

      Bunkers. So, they were doing this also. So, you get areas here, uh, I see there's a slide of India up at the moment, Cappadocia region is very well-known for this.

    6. JR

      How did they know to get underground? How did they know to get into caves? Just basically feeling-

    7. RS

      Oh, I think initially, I think initially, I mean, you've got literally fire coming down from the sky. Think of the lightning bolts, fire.

    8. JR

      Right.

    9. RS

      I mean, if you've got a cave there, you go (laughs) into it.

    10. JR

      It's the only thing that's gonna protect you.

    11. RS

      Yeah, it protects you.

    12. JR

      Tipis and houses are useless, right?

    13. RS

      Oh, yeah. All that burns. I mean, you've got-

    14. JR

      Yeah.

    15. RS

      ... literally fire coming down. Think of it as fire, lightning.

    16. JR

      Yes.

    17. RS

      That is going to set things on fire.

    18. JR

      And you're talking about-

    19. RS

      Literally incinerate.

    20. JR

      But just lightning everywhere.

    21. RS

      Yeah.

    22. JR

      Almost like rainfall.

    23. RS

      Yes, yes, yes.

    24. JR

      Wow.

    25. RS

      In certain areas. And that's why you have huge sheets of glass in some cases.

    26. JR

      Wow. So, that's ca-

    27. RS

      You know?

    28. JR

      Wow.

    29. RS

      Yeah, and so you're incinerating everything. Where it hits, uh, ice, it's f- flash vaporizing it.

    30. JR

      Right.

  11. 43:59 – 59:14

    Academic resistance, institutions, and new tools: muon scans and political gatekeeping

    1. JR

      ... presented this in front of other scholars-

    2. RS

      Yes, yes. It's getting-

    3. JR

      ... and pe- and, and how do they-

    4. RS

      Well, there's a lot of resistance. Look, I'm an academic.

    5. JR

      Right.

    6. RS

      I've... (laughs) Ha- I don't want to sound the wrong way, I'm not looking for sympathy, but going out on limbs like this, going just-

    7. JR

      Right.

    8. RS

      ... beginning with the redating of the Sphinx, and that's what we, we didn't even finish with that yet.

    9. JR

      Right. We'll get back to that.

    10. RS

      But that's okay, we'll get back to that.

    11. JR

      We got plenty of time. (laughs)

    12. RS

      Yeah. Um, there's a lot of resistance to anything that's new.

    13. JR

      Right.

    14. RS

      Any concepts, new ideas.

    15. JR

      Textbooks have already been written.

    16. RS

      Textbooks have been written, people have staked their rep-

    17. JR

      PhDs have been given out, yeah.

    18. RS

      Yeah. Pay, uh, st- uh, they've staked their reputation on it. And I understand that, and I try not to be that myself, you know, the, "Oh, this is my pet theory."

    19. JR

      Right.

    20. RS

      But I do try and look at the evidence. I think that slowly we're building up more and more interest, more and more, um, at least people looking at it objectively.

    21. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    22. RS

      And, uh, I do see changes occurring. Uh, one thing I'll mention, right now, is as of relatively recently, now it's still very, very small, but at Boston University, I've been allowed to found what is called the ISOC, the Institute for the Study of the Origins of Civilization.

    23. JR

      Wow.

    24. RS

      Which is really just me at the moment.

    25. JR

      (laughs)

    26. RS

      But I want to build it up, and I'd like-

    27. JR

      Yeah.

    28. RS

      ... to get ... I'm not trying to sound the wrong way, but I'd like to get people to donate to it, et cetera, et cetera. Um, also, I've, um, uh, founded, with, uh, some colleagues of mine, uh, including some academic colleagues, ORACOL, which stands for the Organization for the Research of Ancient Cultures. So we're bringing it into the mainstream both as a private not-for-profit foundation, as a institute through Boston University, to really be looking at these things in a, when I say professional way, what I mean by that is, you know, evidenced-based way, um, but also looking outside the standard dogmas, the standard boxes, standard paradigms, and the standard vested interests. Because so much science, you know, people say to me all the time, they think science is supposed to be objective. Well, maybe it is supposed to be objective, but who are the scientists doing it? They have all their subjective biases and-

    29. JR

      Right.

    30. RS

      ... notions and vested interests. And I'm not trying to knock anyone, but ...

  12. 59:14 – 1:00:30

    Seismic evidence at the Sphinx: chambers under the paws and the 'archive' hypothesis

    1. JR

      Who is calling for the project to be shut down?

    2. RS

      Some of the Egypt- Egyptian Egyptologists, um, close-

    3. JR

      S-

    4. RS

      ... close to the ministry. And my point is they've done the same thing to me. So, for instance, when we did seismic work and we found the chamber under the left paw of the Sphinx, that's never been explored since, at least not to my knowledge. And they just dismiss it and say, "We know there's nothing there." Um, and that was despite the fact that we also found a chamber at the rump of the Sphinx, which I didn't know about at the time, but they already knew about. So, it confirmed that our data was good-

    5. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    6. RS

      ... 'cause we were finding something they knew about, but when we find something they don't know about and they don't want to be there-

    7. JR

      Right.

    8. RS

      ... they dismiss it and don't wanna pursue it further.

    9. JR

      D- h- have, they have explored one of those chambers, correct? They, did they explore the one that's in the rump?

    10. RS

      The one in the rump, yes. The one in the rump, but it turns out they already knew about it. It's probably not super significant. It probably is just maybe a Greco-Roman or late period, you know, burial or, or some kind of excavation. The one I believe is important is under the left paw of the Sphinx, which I believe is a archive, actually may go back to this very early period because we now have hieroglyphic evidence indicating that, um ...

    11. JR

      What, what does the evidence indicate it's an archive?

  13. 1:00:30 – 1:25:41

    Sphinx redesign and new hieroglyphic claims: the lioness Mehet and the 'JAW sign'

    1. RS

      Okay. So, recently, and this gets back to, um, the Sphinx.

    2. JR

      Yes.

    3. RS

      Okay. So, we started this portion of the discussion with the Sphinx and my initial observations of the Sphinx. And one of my observations was that there's something going on with the weathering ero- and erosion on the Sphinx. The second observation, this is within the first two minutes at most, was that the head is too small for the body. The head is not eroded the way the core body is, it's not erode the way the walls of the Sphinx enclosure are. It's not the original head. I hate to say it this way, but I knew immediately that was not the original head, you know, just from a geological point of view.

    4. JR

      Right.

    5. RS

      And I believe that's now since been fully confirmed that this is not the original head; it was a re-carved head. So, for a long time, the question has been, in my mind, and we talk about this even on Mystery of the Sphinx, what was the original head of the Sphinx? What was the Sphinx originally? We've speculated and other people speculate it might have been a lion, for instance Leo because it faces on the equinox, the constellation Leo in the sky.... not today, but 10,000 BC or so, more or less at the very end of the last Ice Age. Now, I've had a lot of colleagues of mine, academic colleagues say, "That's nonsense," you know, it doesn't mean anything because they weren't even recognizing the constellations back then. Um, we now have plenty of evidence that at least some of the constellations that we recognize today, uh, Leo I would put in that category, uh, uh, Taurus is in that category, Orion is in that cor- category. Some of them, we don't have evidence for, but the ones I just mentioned, the, the, um, they, these are constellations that go back well into the end of the last Ice Age. We have documents of that. We have, um, mammoth bones where you have Orion carved on it. We have Taurus shown in cave walls. We have Leo shown. So s- it's, to me, it's fascinating that some of these constellations that we recognize today were recognized tenths of thousands of years ago. So to me, it's not nonsense that they carved a structure 10,000 BC approximately that was facing its own image in the sky. So one suggestion was that maybe it's Leo. But recently, um, Manou Safzadeh, Dr. Manou Safzadeh, another colleague of mine, he recognized initially that there is a title, what's known as a dual title, in dynastic Egypt that goes back to the fourth dynasty and even back to the first dynasty with the earliest writing. And it, when properly translated, basically refers to the Sphinx as the guardian of an archive. And not the Sphinx as we think of it as a lion with a human head, but as a lioness. And there was a name for this lioness, Mehet. She was the goddess Mehet who guarded a archive. Um, and we wrote a paper on that. When I say we, Manou Safzadeh, myself, and Robert Bauval, who you may know of from Orion Correlation and some of his, his work ties in with this, the archaeoastronomy. But we've now found that there is this sign, which we named the JAW sign in honor of-

    6. JR

      Oh, that's awesome.

    7. RS

      ... in s- honor of John Anthony West. Uh, there it is, there's the JAW sign.

    8. JR

      Ah.

    9. RS

      And what you see here is the lioness Mehet, which was the Sphinx originally based on our reconstruction and interpretation. Um, can't go into all the details now. You can... Actually, people can read the paper. If I could put a plug in, if people go to my website, www.robertschoch, and that's R-O-B-E-R-T, R-O-B-E-R-T S-C-H-O-C-H. The main thing is my name is spelled S-C-H-O-C-H. So www.robertschoch.com, they can go. I did a popular summary of the paper, and they can also go and download the original paper in the peer-reviewed journal, Archaeological Discovery, where we argue that what we have here is the lioness Mehet. She has what looks like a bent rod coming out of her back-

    10. JR

      Pull that-

    11. RS

      ... when people look at the actual image.

    12. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    13. RS

      And then above it is a ax. So-

    14. JR

      That's an ax?

    15. RS

      Yeah. It's, it's, uh, a primitive ax. Um, when I say primitive, even for the ancient Egyptians in dynastic Egypt, it would've been sort of a symbolic ax, if you would.

    16. JR

      Hmm.

    17. RS

      Which was a sign of someone who was in charge of things, a overseer, that type of thing. The bent rod, what is that? That's a primitive key. We would now call it a primitive key, but it represents a key. And so it's basically saying that this is the guardian of the archives of Mehet, the locked chamber or vault of Mehet. And we also have images, I see it up on the board now, if you look at, you've got the lioness with the key and you also have a lioness, not in that image, but a different image that we had before. If you look at that, can you see how there's a lioness sort of a diagrammatic sh- uh, shape over what looks like a facade?

    18. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    19. RS

      Okay, if you then go to the stela that sits between the paws of the Sphinx, you have the same image, much more artistically rendered, of the Sphinx sitting over a facade, over what looks like a building. It's not really a building, it's the archive underneath, I believe.

    20. JR

      So you think there's-

    21. RS

      Which we-

    22. JR

      ... something underneath there.

    23. RS

      Which, oh, I know there's something underneath 'cause long ago, in the early 1990s, Thomas Debecki and I, when we did seismic work around the Sphinx, we found the chamber under the paws of the Sphinx. And it's, I'm sure, an artificial chamber. It's very regular. And this, I believe, could well be, I'm hypothesizing, and in science we make hypotheses that are testable. This is perfectly testable. All we have to do is enter that chamber, even if it's just to put a fiber optic down, and we can see-

    24. JR

      Right.

    25. RS

      ... is it an artificial chamber that's an archive? Hopefully there's still things there, or maybe it was gutted and cleaned out at some point. But here we have the seismic work, one of the, um, seismic maps, I'll call it, tomographic, uh, data. And what's labeled as Anomaly A under the left paw, that is the chamber we found under the left paw that the Egyptologists have wanted to deny ever since. And they don't wanna explore it, and we haven't gotten permission to explore it yet.

    26. JR

      Why don't they wanna explore? I mean, what, that doesn't make any sense to me.

    27. RS

      Well, I know, but this is-

    28. JR

      But if there's physical evidence, right?

    29. RS

      This is politics in Egypt.

    30. JR

      God, it's so squirrelly.

Episode duration: 2:54:42

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