Rating: 
Summary: If you only read one book on the subject, this is the one.
Review: Mr. Hancock has spent much of his adult life investigating the subjects covered in this book. Here he summarizes what he has learned and begins to see a global pattern to these fascinating mysteries.What intriques me about the topics covered in this book, is that these mysteries really do exist...they aren't some fantasy or theory. The explanations for these mysteries might sometimes call for speculation, or theory, but in each instance, Mr. Hancock clearly alerts the reader that he is conjecturing. And he keeps his speculations to a minimum. I have read many of Mr. Hancocks books, and can see him circling closer and closer to the common denominator...the "unifying theory" that ties many of these mysteries together. In the end, I believe he is missing the key piece of the puzzle, largely due to his steadfast insistence on religious neutrality. But Graham Hancock has put his body in exotic and hazardous places in order to bring to us some of the most profound and important puzzles in human history. We owe him gratitude for that, and for his clear and honest reporting. I eagerly await Mr. Hancock's next offering!
Rating: 
Summary: A Wonderfully Photographed Survey of Man's Spiritual Past
Review: Much of what Hancock presented in FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS appears
here, but there is also much that is new -- notably the celestial
alignments of the Yonaguni underwater monument and the beautiful
photography of Santha Faiia from exotic and important sites around the
world. The book has, however, one major failing -- that of paying
homage to the Inquisition-inspired portrayal of the Americas as
populated by savages. Hancock states, "...the great mystery of
Central America is that a culture of such unmitigated ferocity was
also a vehicle for profound religious ideas." He should know
better but Hancock has mixed together truly ancient Mexico --
populated for thousands of years before Christ by Olmecs and the
people who built Teotihuacan -- with the Mexico Cortez encountered in
the 16th C., populated by the barbaric Aztecs. The Aztecs were
relative latecomers to the Valley of Mexico, arriving as little as 300
years before Columbus. They built inferior pyramids -- mostly from
broken stones and boulders of earlier constructions, they borrowed
earlier spiritual beliefs -- including knowledge of Quetzalcoatl (who
advocated the sacrifice only of flowers and butterflies), and they
conducted the mass sacrifices so gleefully related by the historians
under pay of the Church of the Inquisition. Were the Aztecs, as
Hancock seems to say, contributors to the spirituality of Central
America? No, they never got to Central America, and they marked a
confused dead-end to thousands of years of pre-Columbian culture in
Mexico. And although some savagery may have marked the decadent years
of the Maya who did flourish in Central America and Mexico's Yucatan,
it must be remembered that most of the Mayan city-states were built
without defensive walls and with interconnecting canals and roads
(sacbeob), signs of cooperative civilization, not the barbarism that
marked the fortified cities of the Mediterranean and European
regions.
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderfully Photographed Survey of Man's Spiritual Past
Review: Much of what Hancock presented in FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS appearshere, but there is also much that is new -- notably the celestialalignments of the Yonaguni underwater monument and the beautifulphotography of Santha Faiia from exotic and important sites around theworld. The book has, however, one major failing -- that of payinghomage to the Inquisition-inspired portrayal of the Americas aspopulated by savages. Hancock states, "...the great mystery ofCentral America is that a culture of such unmitigated ferocity wasalso a vehicle for profound religious ideas." He should knowbetter but Hancock has mixed together truly ancient Mexico --populated for thousands of years before Christ by Olmecs and thepeople who built Teotihuacan -- with the Mexico Cortez encountered inthe 16th C., populated by the barbaric Aztecs. The Aztecs wererelative latecomers to the Valley of Mexico, arriving as little as 300years before Columbus. They built inferior pyramids -- mostly frombroken stones and boulders of earlier constructions, they borrowedearlier spiritual beliefs -- including knowledge of Quetzalcoatl (whoadvocated the sacrifice only of flowers and butterflies), and theyconducted the mass sacrifices so gleefully related by the historiansunder pay of the Church of the Inquisition. Were the Aztecs, asHancock seems to say, contributors to the spirituality of CentralAmerica? No, they never got to Central America, and they marked aconfused dead-end to thousands of years of pre-Columbian culture inMexico. And although some savagery may have marked the decadent yearsof the Maya who did flourish in Central America and Mexico's Yucatan,it must be remembered that most of the Mayan city-states were builtwithout defensive walls and with interconnecting canals and roads(sacbeob), signs of cooperative civilization, not the barbarism thatmarked the fortified cities of the Mediterranean and Europeanregions.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretty Pictures and Words Do Not Truth Make
Review: Subject to the usual chicanery of excluding some facts and deluding the reader, once again Graham Hancock is going a long way to make a flimsy point. Why is it so hard for all of us to believe that our ancient societies were just doing what we do? What makes us so much better than them?And what does the Sphinx's longitude/latitude relation to other ancient monuments have to do with Greenwich, England? The answer is nothing. Unless you want to believe it does. Which some people do. Or are we to think that the whole idea of longitude and latitude was invented by time-traveling Egyptians who came to the Royal Observatory in England and convinced them to set the Grand Meridian there. Hmmmm? Unfortunately, there will always be people who want to be fed something other than the truth, and if you're that person -- congratulations, this book is for you, and I'm sure Graham is laughing all the way to the bank. Keeping cranks like him employed is your job, so you're doing it well. For the rest of you, do yourselves a favor and walk away, slowly, and don't give this guy another dime.
Rating:
Summary: If Hancock can read Chinese history
Review: The holy mountain of E'Mei in China is also 72 degree east of Giza, the name of Kingdom in Ryukyu before it was conqured by Japan was Zhongshan. Zhongshan was also the name of another ancient Kingdom whose national sign was a big fork, like the one on the Nascar Plain. What we knew about the ancient civilizations is too little, Confucian was critized for decribing the ancient time as a much advanced era than our time, and most modern Chinese do not believe. 10500 BC? May be that's what Confucian mean the perfect ancient time.
Rating:
Summary: A bag of bones vs. Acres of Stone
Review: The modern world offers the tragic spectacle of a world without a center, a world in which science, philosophy, and religion confront us with a chaotic babble of conflicting opinions, a world which seems to many to be on its way to utter ruin. Observing this, many of us would no doubt like to believe that man must surely once have been capable of something better, capable of creating a true civilization, one with both a center and a higher purpose, one which had achieved a synthesis of science and religion and in which life was lived in full awareness of its spiritual dimension. But at this point our modern palaeontologists rise up before us. Pointing to the bag of bones which is their stock-in-trade, the allegedly "human" remains about which they spin endless conjectures, they boldly assure us: "No. Ours is the first and only civilization. Prior to what we "scientists" recognize as history, men lived in caves. And prior to that they were monkeys. How do we know? Because the bones say so." Hancock, happily, does not come before us with a mere bag of bones, bones which if gathered together could be laid out on a couple of billiard tables. He comes before us with incontrovertible evidence of a global network of vast acres of sacred complexes located at geodetically strategic points, complexes which are miracles of engineering and which embody both a profound metaphysic and an incredible wealth of mathematical, geodetic, and astronomical knowledge, along with an intensely spiritual art and an advanced science which we are only now beginning to understand. Taken together, these sites present overwhelming evidence for the existence of an advanced civilization which appears to have been destroyed in some global cataclysm perhaps 12,000 years or so ago, but not before it had devised a means of preserving aspects of its higher knowledge. The men whose knowledge lay behind these complexes were spiritual and intellectual giants. Perhaps one of the reasons they built them was so that we would not forget what human beings were capable of in the past. Read Hancock and you will never be the same again. His book is a more than welcome antidote to the pseudoscience currently being propagated at our universities. 'Heaven's Mirror' is well-researched, Hancock having personally visited all the sites he discusses. It is also extremely well-written and well-documented (though a bibliography would have been helpful). And Santha Faiia's illustrations are stunning. In contrast to the somewhat insipid Madonnas of our own tradition, the intense spirituality of some of the art we are shown in 'Heaven's Mirror' may well make us wonder how much we have lost. Having said this, however, I should add that, if the book has a weakness, it is perhaps Hancock's tendency to overemphasize the purely 'religious' function of the ancient sites, while failing to suspect that their function as scientific instruments may have been much richer than he imagines.
Rating:
Summary: Hancock, a good observer: it's a virtue, you have to admit
Review: The thing that should fascinate every one is discovering and hearing new things. When Galileo first said that the earth is round and that the sun is the center of our galaxy and the earth, everyone stood against him and made fun of him; when the first doctors in history treated someone of his disease they were considered as sorcerers; when some scientist discovers or invents something new, there is always someone that envies him and stands against him. Our world is made of anger! When Hancock wrote in his book that a more sophisticated and advanced civilization existed before the year 10500 BC., he didn't say that just based upon his imagination, what he said makes more sense than every other scientist. The Sphinx is synchronized with Leo constellation, the three Pyramids are perfectly synchronized with the Orion constellation, and the temple of Angkor is perfectly synchronized with the Drako constellation, but the synchronizing occurs in 10500 BC. OK, this may be a coincidence, but what about the orientation of each place of the last mentioned, and what about the holes in the Pyramids walls, and which are exactly orientated towards the Orion constellation. But the most interesting things of all are the dimensions that these places present, the longitude, the Latitude, the number of bricks: it had to be a logic to all that. We have sophisticated architecture plans in our days, but I don't think that any of their parameters are perfectly matching with any of the known constellations. Taking into consideration all the things and parameters that are presented, none of Hancock's conclusions seem "nongrata". As about the criticism given to this book, or shall I say given to the ideas? They are totally unfounded: some book critics don't admit that there may be a much more intelligent person than they are, that's beside of the fact that many university professors don't know what is beyond the seas, or how to change a flat tire, so why should you take this limited intelligence criticism into consideration, think logically, and don't pay attention to critics, who wouldn't be able to sell popcorn in a cinema's hall if it wasn't for the people who listen to them, don't let anybody think for you. It's a great book! Enjoy reading it.
Rating:
Summary: Myths and Monuments as Signs
Review: There are essentially five types of arguments for one or more intelligent ET civilizations having visited and exploited earth and influencing (if not helping "create") humanity and continuing to do so. The first is the logico-statistical, which is essentially that in a universe as large and as old as ours, anything that can happen has happened, does happen, and will happen in a mulititude of spacetime locales. The second is the mythological: Our sacred histories are full of accounts of the gods, sons of god, angels, demons, faeries, etc. coming to earth from the sky, out of the sea, etc. The third is the testimony of all those who have seen flying saucers and met various intelligent non-humans (some of whom allegedly advise that, yes indeed, they have been coming and going for milleinia). The fourth are the megalithic monuments found all over the world whose origins, engineering, and construction are inexplicably sophisticated and, in some cases, beyond any known human technology, past or present. The fifth is the aesthetic argument, to the effect that in our time, science fiction is prophecy, from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to Gene Roddenberry, and within such genre, intelligent non-human civilizations are fundamental. The fact that current human science and technology (whether or not inadvertently a/o secretly assisted by ETI), much of it classified, has either accomplished or is now on the verge of such things as "anti-gravity" field propulsion vehicles (i.e. "flying saucers"), particle beam weaponry, and bio-engineering transgenic species and increased longevity, makes it all the more plausible (if not demonstrable) that the sons of adam may simply be tracing the same paths pursued by other, more mature civilizations. Hancock's explorations of the megalithic monuments and myths and the questions he raises are truly worth pondering. However, his hypotheses about a secret society of astronomer-priests which many find too fanciful and preposterous, are, in my opinion, to the contrary, insufficiently imaginitive if one merely accepts the conclusion of the first argument above. It is not crop circles (which humans can make with computer controlled directed energy devices such as masers) that are the "signs" we should attend to; they are the myths and megalithic monuments. The "gods" have left far more than their fingerprints; they have left all sorts of messages for the sons of adam. (Among these messages, for example, are that man has both a body and soul, his body is subject to death, and his soul must reckon with divine judgment concerning the good and evil he does. Eternal life as enjoyed by those who live in the heavenly realms is an ancient quest for the sons of adam.) Hancock and his talented wife are to be commended for calling our attention to some of these myths and monuments so expertly and helping us better see how truly marvelous they are. Wonder if they had any help from on high?
Rating:
Summary: No words
Review: There are no words for how exceptional this book is. There is a fine line between "myth" and "math". Most people are so caught up in what they are told from the time of childhood, that they cannot expand they're thoughts to what is truth. This book has the measurements, and the equations that equal more questions to what we have been trained to know.
Rating:
Summary: No words
Review: There are no words for how exceptional this book is. There is a fine line between "myth" and "math". Most people are so caught up in what they are told from the time of childhood, that they cannot expand they're thoughts to what is truth. This book has the measurements, and the equations that equal more questions to what we have been trained to know.
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