emphryio

Hancock on TLC tonight, which leads me to remark....
In his book, "Fingerprints of the Gods", Hancock says that every 12 or 13,000 years a huge crustal displacement occurs swinging continents thousands of miles, blah blah. He supports this, among other ways, by talking about the reversal of the magnetic poles. It last happened 12,400 years ago and, "Scientists expect the next reversal of the earth's magnetic poles to occur around AD 2030", he says on page 485. So that means around 2030 there will be a huge catastrophe destroying most if not all of civilization. Hmmm sounds serious.
But he actually gives a reference for this sentence, I looked it up. Its 2230, not 2030. That would seem to be a huge difference. Considering he's talking about this huge catastrophe, it would seem impossible it was an honest mistake.

Of course earlier he talks about numerology so maybe most people were either too smart to bother reading to page 485 and those who were dumb enough to read that far were also either too dumb or too lazy to look up a reference.
Except me, who apparently falls in-between.

The point is he lies to create sensationalism to make money. I imagine some other people must have noticed this but not to many because there he is, with his own special on The Learning Channel.

Francois Tremblay

Pardon my layman ignorance, but how are magnetic shifts supposed to fling around continents over long distances ? Continents aren't exactly frisbees.

Marduk

"Pardon my layman ignorance, but how are magnetic shifts supposed to fling around continents over long
distances ? Continents aren't exactly frisbees. "


They don't, it's another one of his intentional distortions, confusing a shift in the magnetic poles with an actual physical shift or sliding of the North pole to the South, more dramatic you see.
Turning the world upside down.

Jeremy Pallant

Sounds to me like Graham Hancock is a follower of Edgar Cayce. Wasn't pole swapping one of his favorites?

Marduk

Hancock is in the same pseudoscience ballpark as Sitchin.
He has a few good points but in order to sell lots of books and make it on the lecture circuit he has to flesh them out with lots of nonsense. I know how real archaeologists hate anything to do with Atlantis, preexisting advanced civilizations or ancient astronauts but there is nothing essentially wrong or unscientific about investigating the origins of ancient myths. That is how the city of Troy and the origin of Noah’s flood were found (the Black Sea Project). If these guys would stick to the facts and do some hard work they could come up with some decent scholarly books, of course they wouldn’t sell as well.

case

There's an excellent article debunking Hancock in the current issue of "Skeptic". It covers the magnetic shifts, and Hancock's connection with Edgar Cayce. Personally, I think Hancock is just carrying the torch of a long line of pseudoscientific archeologists, who refuse to believe that ancient peoples had the knowledge or the know-how to accomplish all that they did. He heard the hoofbeats, and started looking for zebras.

lpetrich

A magnetic-pole reversal is not a sudden flipover, but the dipole component of the magnetic field going through zero. The dipole component is usually the strongest component observed; higher-pole components are also present, and continue to be present when the dipole goes through zero, thus giving the Earth's magnetic field a more complicated "shape" at that time.

Jesse

Here's a nice page on archaeological pseudoscience:

<a href="http://www.antiquityofman.com/pseudoscience.html" target="_blank">http://www.antiquityofman.com/pseudoscience.html</a>