Until I get back to my notes, here is the post conference National Press Club/CNN press conference that took place Monday morning (in a six part video - that gives an overview of the X-Conference exopolitical agenda).
Part five details the carbon nanotube structure and mass spectometer analysis of 'implants' (expert analysis determined the implants are not of terrestial origin and contain some engineering):
http://www.realufos.net/2009/04/fifth-annual-x-conference-cnn-news.html************
I'll add my note on Graham Hancock here:
While Graham declared he does not usually speak at UFO related engagements, his reason for attending was his work in 'Supernaturals'. I'll add a previous interview with Graham here, that shows his connection to alien theories.
He flew over from England specifically for this conference. He stated he was exhausted (and it was visibly apparent) but that did not deter a well spoken presentation, and his gracious demeanor in answering questions from a long line of people at the podium after his speech.
I gave him a small Robert Bruce Baird press kit (no books) for a brief introduction to his work, and told him one of the author's main points is that people are quick to accept easy answers. (I included a suggestion to host Bob as guest on Grahams series 'Author of the Month' on his website).
My friend John brought along his copy of Graham's 'Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization' to which he signed, and they talked 'scuba diving', which Graham seemed to enjoy as a welcome relief to all the alien/ufo questions.
This is just a few exerpts from the interview. Its worth reading in its entirety to get the gist of where Graham is coming from:
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. DNA, it's difficult to explain.
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: 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: 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.
http://www.dailygrail.com/node/2369(as a postscript: In retrospect, I wish I had included Bob's article 'Hominid Inter-breeding' in the press kit I gave to Graham. That article is one that I had on the list but left behind. I'll post it on Graham's website - in the forum):
http://www.opentopia.com/showart.php?source=go&artid=47866&catid=46Graham Hancock youtube interview with George Noory on Coast to Coast:
Shamanism Aliens & Ayahuasca : Graham Hancock Pt.1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzKp2PeXeWI
Chat Forum
