Though few would question the popularity of Raiders of the Lost Ark, no academic worth his salt, ever dared to say the movie was more than a Hollywood fantasy, either. So when respected British author Graham Hancock announced to the world in 1992 that he had actually tracked the legendary Ark of the Covenant of Old Testament fame to a modern-day resting place in Ethiopia, serious eyebrows everywhere twitched upward. Nevertheless, objective readers of his monumental volume The Sign and the Seal, on both sides of the Atlantic, soon realized that Hancock's case, incredible though it seemed, was not to be easily dismissed. The exhaustively researched work went on to enjoy widespread critical acclaim, to become a best-seller in both America and the U.K. as well as to become the subject of several television specials.

Hancock's writing and journalistic skills had been honed during stints as a war correspondent in Africa for The Economist and The London Sunday Times. Winner of an honorable mention for the H.L. Mencken Award (The Lords of Poverty, 1990), he also authored African Ark: Peoples of the Horn, and Ethiopia: The Challenge of Hunger. In The Sign And The Seal, Hancock was credited by The Guardian with having invented a new genre, an intellectual whodunit by a do-it-yourself sleuth....

Apparently though, the success of The Sign and the Seal has only whetted the writer's appetite for establishment chagrin. In his latest book Hancock is out for even bigger game. In fact, Fingerprints of the Gods seeks nothing less than to overthrow the cherished doctrine taught in classrooms worldwide, that civilization was born roughly 5,000 years ago. Anything earlier, we are told, was strictly primitive. In one of the most comprehensive efforts on the subject ever, over 600 pages of meticulous research, Hancock presents breakthrough evidence of a forgotten epoch in human history which preceded by thousands of years the presently acknowledged cradles of civilization in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Far East. Moreover, he argues, this same lost culture was not only highly advanced but technologically proficient and was destroyed more than 12,000 years ago by the global cataclysm which brought the ice age to its sudden and dramatic conclusion.

Just released in the U.S., Fingerprints of the Gods (Crown, 608 pp.), seeks to duplicate early successes in Great Britain where by mid-June it had already enjoyed considerable critical praise and six straight weeks as the number-one bestseller. Kirkus Reviews called it a fancy piece of historical sleuthing, breathless, but intriguing and entertaining and sturdy enough to give a long pause for thought.

In America to promote Fingerprints, Hancock was at his hotel room in Washington, D.C. when Atlantis Rising caught up with him. With just two days of the tour behind him, it was still too early to estimate how the book would do here, but already he was enjoying the kind of favorable media attention which helped to make The Sign and the Seal an American hit. Interviewers, he felt, were generally positive and open to his ideas. While the reception among academics has been something less than cordial, that was to be expected. One of the reasons the book is so long, he explained, is because I've really tried to document everything very thoroughly, so that the academics have to deal with the evidence, rather than me as an individual, or with what, they like to think, are rather vague wishy-washy ideas. I've tried to nail it all down to hard fact as far as possible.

Nailing down the facts took Hancock on a worldwide odyssey which included stops in Peru, Mexico, and Egypt. Among the many intriguing mysteries which the author was determined fully to investigate were:

• Ancient maps showing precise knowledge of the actual coastline of Antarctica, notwithstanding the fact that the location has been buried under thousands of feet of ice for many millennia.
• Stone building technology, beyond our present capacity to duplicate, in Central and South America, as well as Egypt.
• Sophisticated archeo-astronomical alignments at ancient sites all over the world.
• Evidence of comprehensive ancient knowledge of the 25,776-year precession of the equinoxes (unmistakably encoded into ancient mythology and building sites, even though the phenomenon would have taken, at a minimum, many generations of systematic observation to detect, and which conventional scholarship tells us was not discovered until the Greek philosopher Hipparchus in about 150 B.C.).
• Water erosion of the Great Sphinx dating it to before the coming of desert conditions to the Giza plateau (as researched by American scholar John Anthony West and geologist Robert Schoch).
• Evidence that the monuments of the Giza plateau were built in alignment with the belt of Orion at circa. 10,500 B.C. (as demonstrated by Belgian engineer Robert Bauval).

Unfettered as he is by the constraints under which many so-called specialists operate, Hancock sees himself uniquely qualified to undertake such a far-reaching study. One of the problems with academics, and particularly academic historians, he insists, is they have a very narrow focus. And as a result they are very myopic.

Hancock is downright contemptuous of organized Egyptology, which he places in the particularly short-sighted category. There's a rigid paradigm of Egyptian history, he complains, which seems to function as a kind of filter on knowledge and which stops Egyptologists, as a profession, from being even the remotest bit open to any other possibilities at all. In Hancock's view Egyptologists tend to behave like priests in a very narrow religion, dogmatically and irrationally, if not superstitiously. A few hundred years ago they would have burned people like me and John West at the stake, he laughs.

Such illogical zealotry Hancock fears stands in the way of the public's right to know about what could be one of the most significant discoveries ever made in the Great Pyramid. In 1993, the German inventor Rudolph Gantenbrink sent a robot with a television camera up a narrow shaft from the Queen's chamber and discovered what appears to be a door with iron handles. That door, Hancock suspects, might lead to the legendary hall of records of the ancient Egyptians. But whatever is behind it, he feels it must be properly investigated. So far, though, there has been no official action, at least not a public one. Citing episodes personally witnessed, he protests you have Egyptologists saying there is no point in looking to see if there's anything behind that slab', they call it a slab', they won't call it a door, because we know there's not another chamber inside the great pyramid. The attitude infuriates Hancock, I wonder how they know that, in this 6-million-ton monument which has got room for 3,000 chambers the same size as the king's chamber. How do they have the temerity and the nerve to suggest that there's no point in looking?

The tantalizing promise of that door has led Hancock to speculate that the builders may have purposely arranged things to require technology of ultimate explorers. Nobody could get in there unless they had a certain level of technology. And he points out that even a hundred years ago we didn't have the means to do it. In the last 20 years the technology has been developed and now the shaft has been explored, and lo and behold; at the end is a door with handles. It's like an invitation, an invitation to come on in, look inside, when you're ready.

Hancock is far from sanguine about official intentions. If that door ever does get open, probably there will be no public access at all to what happens. He would like to see an international team present, but suspects that, instead, what we're going to get is a narrow elite group of Egyptologists who will strictly control information about what happens. In fact, he thinks it's possible that they've even been in there already. The Queen's chamber was suspiciously closed for more than nine months after Gantenbrink made his discovery. The story was given out that they were cleaning the graffiti off the walls but the graffiti was never cleaned off. I wonder what they were doing in there those nine months. There's what really makes me angry, that this narrow group of scholars control knowledge of what is at the end of the day the legacy of the whole of mankind.

Gantenbrink's door is not the only beckoning portal on the Giza plateau. Hancock is equally interested in the chamber which John Anthony West and Robert Schoch, in the course of investigating the weathering of the Sphinx, detected, by seismic methods, beneath the paws. Either location might prove to be the site of the hall of records. In both cases, the authorities have resisted all efforts at further investigation.

Hancock believes the entire Giza site was constructed after the crust of the earth had stabilized following a 30-degree crustal displacement which destroyed most of the high civilization then standing. According to Rand and Rose Flem-Ath's When the Sky Fell, upon which Hancock relies, that displacement had moved an entire continent from temperate zones to the south pole where it was soon buried under mountains of ice. This, he believes, is the real story of the end of Plato's Atlantis, but the A word is not mentioned until very late. I see no point in giving a hostile establishment a stick to beat me with, he offers. It's purely a matter of tactics.

The Giza complex was built, Hancock speculates, as part of an effort to remap and reorient civilization. For that reason he believes the 10,500 B.C. date (demonstrated by Bauval) to be especially important. The pyramids are a part of saying this is where it stopped. That's why the perfect alignment, for example, to due north, of the Great Pyramid is extremely interesting, because they obviously would have had a new north at that time.

Despite a determination to stick with the hard evidence, Hancock is not uncomfortable with the knowledge that his work is serving to corroborate the claims of many intuitives and mystics. On the contrary, he believes, that the (clairvoyant ability) of human beings is another one of those latent faculties which modern rational science simply refuses to recognize. I think we're a much more mysterious species than we give ourselves credit for. Our whole cultural conditioning is to deny those elements of intuition and mystery in ourselves. But all the indications are that these are, in fact, vital faculties in human beings, and I suspect that the civilization that was destroyed, although technologically advanced, was much more spiritually advanced than we are today.

Such knowledge, he believes, is part of the legacy of the ancients which we must strive to recover. What comes across again and again, particularly from documents like the ancient Egyptian Pyramid texts, which I see as containing the legacy of knowledge and ideas from this lost civilization, is a kind of science of immortality, a quest for the immortality of the soul. I feeling that immortality may not be guaranteed to all and everybody simply by being born. It may be something that has to be worked for. Something that results from the focused power of the mind. The real purpose of the pyramids, he suggests, may be to teach us how to achieve immortality. But before we can understand, we must recover from the ancient amnesia.

Hancock believes we are a species with amnesia. I think we show all the signs that there's a traumatic episode in our past, which is so horrible that we cannot somehow bring ourselves to recognize it. Just as the victim suffering from amnesia as a result of some terrible episode fears awakening memory of that trauma and tries to avoid it, so we have done collectively. The amnesia victim is, of course, forced to return to the source of his pain and, if you wish to move forward and continue to develop as an individual you have to overcome it. You have to confront it, deal with it, see it face to face, realize what it means, get over it, and get on with your life. That is what society needs to be doing.

In the institutional resistance to considering ancient achievement, Hancock sees a subconscious pattern based on fear. There's a huge impulse to deny all of this, because suddenly all the foundations get knocked out from under you and you find yourself swimming loosely in space without any points of reference anymore. The process needn't be so threatening though. If we can go through that difficult experience and come out on the other side, I think we'll all emerge better from it. I'm more and more convinced that the reason we are so messed up and confused and totally disturbed as a species at the end of the 20th century is because of this, because we've forgotten our past.

If it is true that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it, then there are lessons in our past which can be ignored only at our peril. Clearly written into the mythology of many societies are stories of cataclysmic destruction. Hancock cites the work of Giorgio de Santillana, an authority on the history of science at M.I.T. In his book Hamlet's Mill, Santillana hypothesized an advanced scientific knowledge was encoded into ancient myth. Hancock points out, Once you accept that mythology may have originated with highly advanced people, then you have to start listening to what the myths are saying. What the myths are saying, he believes, is that a great cataclysm struck the world and destroyed an advanced civilization and a golden age of mankind. And the bad cataclysm is a recurrent feature in the life of the Earth and will return. The messages from many ancient sources, including the Bible, point to a recurrence of such a cataclysm in our lifetime. Notwithstanding such views, Hancock insists he is not a prophet of doom. His point is, We've received a legacy of extraordinary knowledge from the past, and the time has come for us to stop dismissing it. Rather, we must recapture that heritage, learn what we can from it, because there is vitally important information in it.

The stakes couldn't be higher. I'm convinced that we're locked today in a battle of ideas, he says. I think it's desperately important that the ideas that will lead to a recovery of our memory as a species triumph. And therefore we have to be strong, we have to be eloquent, and argue clearly and coherently. We have to see what our opponents are going to do, how they are going to try to get at us. And the dirty tricks that they are going to try and play. We have to fight them on their own ground.

Hancock's next book will be a collaboration with Robert Bauval in which he plans not only to complete the decoding of the archeo-astronomy of the Giza plateau, but also to protest the way official Egyptology has behaved. In the process, Hancock promises to air some of the establishment's dirty linen, to look behind the scenes at what they've been doing, how research has been hindered, misled and misguided by a narrow group of scholars protecting their own interests at the cost of the rest of humanity. We have uncovered a really serious scandal in Egyptology which, once it's brought out into public view, will make it impossible for this group of scholars, who have controlled Giza for the last 20 years, to have any credibility at all.

In the meantime Fingerprints of the Gods promises to expose