It’s a subject I care about a great deal, the idea that there was an advanced civilization in North America going back to much longer times than has been attributed to the Bering Strait migration of people from Asia into what has been called the New World. I have done many articles on the giants of Ohio and on the probability that there was an ancient empire of very tall people all through the Ohio River Valley predating all known records based on the mound-building culture that is so abundant in the region. It really came alive for me when I made a trip to Stonehenge and saw not just the celestial alignments that were popularly captured by the large megalithic stones there, very similar to Serpent Mound in my home area of the world, but the many, many mounds that were surrounding the area. The history books seem to forget about those and concentrate just on the stonework that is so popularly recorded. That’s when I knew for sure that there had been travel between North America and the British Isles predating Christ. And during the Ice Age, this might have been possible since the ocean levels were 400 feet lower at that time. Land bridges like the Bering Strait would have allowed for travel all over the world to be much easier. But even that didn’t tell the story the way I knew it needed to be told and that occurred to me in an argument with a British Museum employee when I was looking for the famous Crystal Skull that is on display there. The employee explained to me as if he were trying to convince himself that the skull had to be a fake because when it was dated, nobody on earth had found a way to polish quartz in such a seamless manner. That technology wouldn’t be invented until fairly recent times. So the true answer was concealed in a kind of European, institutional arrogance that seems to put a wet blanket over all the sciences institutionally funded and so limited in scope to their specific fields. 

I have known about Graham Hancock for a long time; he has written several spectacular books that consolidate in a way that is appropriate all the countless hours from various scientific fields to tell a unified story based on a few centuries of discovery. And the stories coming from him are vastly different from the textbooks. Science cannot be analyzed in a vacuum, and determinations made based on the desires of whoever funds the activity. So to correct that problem, Graham Hancock has come on the scene and started to put the puzzle pieces together about a significant number of previously unchallenged assumptions. That makes his book, America Before into, what, I think, is one of the most important books ever written because it tells the story of a number of issues that places North America at the front of the train of human consciousness development and advanced nation-building in ways that have been building for a long time. But science and politics did not want to admit to it. It was clear to me at Stonehenge that a massive global culture had existed in the past; they had boats that could visit each other. To me, the only question was whether those migrations moved from Europe to America or America to Europe, and thus, the rest of the world. The resistance, just as was the case with my experience with the Crystal Skull in the British Museum, was that institutionalized mainstreamers did not believe that any oceanic vessels could make such a journey until Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America. As it turns out, Columbus knew about the New World from old maps that predate the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, prior to the Dark Ages, which sought to cleanse the world of all pagan references, maps included. An ancient civilization made those maps, perhaps more advanced than our present society, and the timing of that society places it at its most prosperous period during the Ice Age some 15,000 years ago.

That civilization, as proposed by a lot of evidence provided in America Before, shows that a giant comet struck the earth in Michigan when the ice sheets were still there and created the Saginaw Bay in Michigan, which is essentially an impact crater. The results of the impact and trajectory of debris can be found all over North America, specifically in mysterious craters in Nebraska and the Carolinas. This is what is being called the Younger Dryas cataclysm, and it was a world killer in that it wiped out life on earth in most of the civilized areas. What was left as a result was those lives untouched by a civilization that remembered elements of the previous culture, and those elements showed themselves in various religions all around the world. Sumer, Egypt, Indus Valley, and the mound builders of the Mississippi Valley are all aspects of culture that reemerged thousands of years after the cataclysm that destroyed civilization and much of the life on earth at the end of the Ice Age. And this catastrophe has been hiding in plain sight for all this time because our focus has been on the Ice Age, not a cataclysm that occurred during it. While these pieces are still being put together in puzzle pieces mixed in different boxes, the picture is becoming much more precise, and the work that Graham Hancock did in America Before will prove to be the standard for all the future. He suggests that in North America, we are seeing the Lost Continent of Atlantis, perhaps a parent culture to that mythology. It was completely wiped out by the comet impact and the massive flooding that occurred in the wake. The ocean’s sea level rose suddenly by 6 feet during this time, which would only happen if vast amounts of ice from the Ice Age suddenly melted. 

For proof that mainstream scientists would seek to conceal evidence, we learned through Covid to what extent politics plays a part in science. So given the nature of the political world, and much to Graham’s frustration, his thoughts are being rejected just as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were rejected as treatments for Covid. Or the political establishment soundly dismissed the premise of election fraud because they wanted to get rid of Donald Trump from the White House at all costs. We see the same conspiracies here, with this idea that a very advanced civilization with intensely accurate understandings of the cosmos thrived in North America, climaxing over 100,000 years of evolution that science missed entirely because they were looking at the ice, not the societies. And they didn’t want anybody to figure out that their diffusion theories about the Bering Strait were no longer valid. Mankind rose and fell many times following the Vico Cycle, and the culture that was thriving around the world during the Ice Age was just one of them. But that it rose and fell away so completely reveals in us all the terminal process of civilization itself. We’d like to believe that what we do is permanent, and such a concept reveals how thin everything really is. And that is a frightening prospect to institutionalists who put everything into the process but not so much emphasis on the substance. And what America Before is all about is substance. The rest of the world will catch up eventually, and when they do, they’ll find that everything started in America, and at a fundamental level, we still know it. America is that shining city on the hill, not because it was taken from Native Americans. But because we knew it was once before, this current rendition of America is just a repeat of the past, without the destruction of a comet to wipe it all out.

Rich Hoffman