The Cosmic Tusk

George Howard sits down with Daniel Hodges of the Hodge Cast for a conversation that moves from the frontlines of the second Sphinx debate to the collapse of free speech in Britain, held together by a single recurring theme - why intelligent people keep shutting things down before they have done the work. The Filippo Biondi situation is live as they record. George's frustration is not with mainstream sceptics but with members of the alternative community dismissing Biondi's second Sphinx findings without visiting his website or engaging with his methodology. He made a public $100 wager with a prominent figure who put the odds of Biondi's research at 100 to 1. The wager was declined. George calls it the Presbyterian and Methodist problem - factionalism within a community is often more hostile than anything directed outward. He also revisits the Malcolm Bendall thunderstorm generator - a clean energy device he tested extensively that has since grown to an industrial-scale installation in Australia. He remains comfortable with ambiguity, but notes someone is spending serious money on something that had better work. Daniel brings the conversation to Britain - 12,000 social media arrests in a year, a mother jailed for two and a half years for a tweet while grooming gang members walked free with two years, and a writer detained by seven armed police at Heathrow for a joke on X. Both men land in the same place: staying genuinely curious, resisting the urge to decide before you understand, is rarer and more valuable than either side of any argument tends to acknowledge. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Z5KZ2cui8WDjyF6gJ/some-thoughts-on-toby-ord-s-existential-risk-estimates https://cosmictusk.com/wally-broecker-says-a-cosmic-impact-caused-the-younger-dryas/ https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion/uncovered-risks-no-oversight-of-uncs-extreme-virology/ Enjoy this conversation? Catch more here: https://youtu.be/wULC5AJ3mqI?si=ryd5CW5X_SAgOpsW

Few conversations in the alternative history space cover as much ground as this one. George Howard sits down with Timothy Hogan - 33rd Grand Master of the Knights Templar and 32nd Degree Scottish Rite Freemason - for a wide-ranging discussion that moves from the bones of the Holy Family to the founding of the United States, from Gnostic Christianity to Napoleon's initiation in the Great Pyramid. Timothy opens with a revelation he describes as never having shared publicly before. The Templar Order holds three surviving vaults containing artefacts from the pre-flood civilisation - two in the United States and one in Istanbul. The Istanbul vault, stored in a diorite box of the kind found at the Serapeum, contains what Timothy identifies as possible non-human technology recovered from the object known as the Palladium - the artefact the Trojan War was fought over. The Vatican located this vault, rented a hotel room nearby, tunnelled toward it, and attempted to break in with jackhammers before Turkish antiquities authorities detected the vibrations and shut the operation down. From there the conversation opens into Gnostic theology - the tradition Timothy argues the Templar Order has always preserved and that differs fundamentally from orthodox Christianity at almost every point. The divine spark exists within every human being. Jesus was not the Saviour but the great exemplar - here to remind humanity of what it already is. The resurrection was not a physical event but an initiation - the Greek word anastasis simply means to wake up. The God of the Old Testament was the Demiurge, a lesser being created by Sophia outside the Pleroma, not the true God of light and love. Reincarnation was a core early Christian teaching. Born again meant literally born again. The Templar mission, Timothy explains, was always civilisational. The Order was founded to locate surviving pockets of pre-flood knowledge, recover the artefacts and technologies of what he calls the root civilisation - Atlantis - and use them to rebuild. That effort produced the Renaissance. When Europe proved too controlled by church and monarchy to sustain the project, the Templars redirected it to a new territory. The United States was established as the New Atlantis - a Templar state built on the Gnostic principle that the divine spark within every human being is the foundation of freedom, democracy, and inalienable rights. Napoleon, Timothy reveals, was a Templar - his grandfather was Bonnie Prince Charlie and his personal physician was the underground Grand Master of the Order, Bernard Raymond Faber. Napoleon's Egyptian campaign was not military adventurism. It was a Templar mission to recover knowledge. He was initiated in the Great Pyramid in a ceremony Timothy's lineage still performs today - and when asked what happened inside, Napoleon replied that no one would believe him anyway. The earliest Masonic documents - the Gothic manuscripts - describe Freemasonry not as a Templar institution but as the Noahite tradition: the knowledge that survived the flood, traced back through Egypt to the pre-cataclysm civilisation. The Templars found that knowledge in Egypt. Freemasonry was how they preserved and transmitted it after the Order was suppressed in 1307.

Aaron Hines and Cody McDonald are self-described pajama scientists - two independent researchers with day jobs, families, and an obsession with the deep past that has taken them from the highlands of Peru to the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula. The centrepiece of this conversation is Cody's three-year research project that led them both into the southern Yucatan jungle to investigate undocumented ruins. Working from satellite imagery showing right-angle features in the jungle canopy - cross-referenced against a US Geological Survey geomagnetic anomaly map - Cody identified a location that appeared on no archaeological literature, only marked with an unlabelled star on the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya's comprehensive site map. They parked on a jungle track, hacked over a kilometre through dense vegetation, and found four rectangular stone structures sitting on elevated ground - the first people, as far as they know, to ever film them. The discovery came at a cost: Cody severed a tendon on his machete within two minutes of arrival, inadvertently delivering the Mayan blood offering he had spent months researching how to perform correctly on the blood moon eclipse that night. Beyond the expedition, the conversation opens into the broader research frameworks each brings to the field. Aaron's primary focus is tracking pre-Younger Dryas megalithic remnants - the precision stonework attributed to the Inca but built from andesite and diorite using tools that a Bronze Age culture should not have possessed - found not only in Peru but at sites across Mexico, Japan, India, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and the Americas. He is looking for the physical signature of the civilisation the Younger Dryas wiped out. Cody's interests run parallel but through a different lens - ancient occult knowledge and the Maya specifically, whom he views as having been spiritually connected to the planet in a way that sets them apart from other ancient societies. Both researchers arrived at this work through the internet, met online, and ended up in a jungle in Mexico together. That trajectory, George Howard argues, is the great weaving - the self-organising network of intensely motivated independent researchers who, collectively, may know more about the deep past than the credentialed institutions tasked with studying it.

Dr. Filippo Biondi is a satellite radar specialist who has spent more than three years scanning the Giza Plateau using synthetic aperture radar data from multiple commercial satellite systems. His work on the plateau has already produced significant subsurface findings. In the last month, working with independent researcher Damiano Pieracci who identified the candidate location, Biondi turned his processing capabilities toward a mound in the Western Cemetery at Giza - and what he found stopped him. The geometric case he presents is precise. Working from the known position of the existing Sphinx, he established a series of line segments connecting it to the proposed second location. What emerged was a set of relationships that should not exist by chance - parallel lines, proportional segments, and equivalent areas that only hold if the proposed location is correct. Move the second point by even a small distance in any direction and every relationship collapses simultaneously. His working hypothesis, shared with around 80% confidence while processing is still ongoing, is that the two structures face in opposite directions - one oriented toward the sunrise, one toward the sunset. The candidate site is a compressed sand mound in the Western Cemetery, a part of the plateau that receives very little research attention. Biondi has scans of the location that he is not yet ready to release pending completion of the analysis, which he intends to present in full at a conference in Bologna in June 2026.

Dr. Dallas Abbott is a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University - one of the most prestigious geophysical research institutions in the world. For more than two decades, working largely outside the mainstream conversation around Holocene impacts, she has been building a case that a cosmic object struck the southern Indian Ocean within the last 12,000 years and sent a megatsunami across the hemisphere. The physical evidence she identified begins in Madagascar. Sand deposits were found at the top of a fault scarp - meaning the wave that carried them had to be at least 60 metres high to push material to an elevation of 180 metres above sea level. Abbott is direct about what that implies. No ordinary terrestrial process produces a 60-metre wave. The proposed source is a submarine crater candidate she calls Burkle Crater, situated in the southern Indian Ocean at a position her wave modelling confirms could have generated large waves reaching both Madagascar and Australia simultaneously. More recently, her team recovered a 2.8-metre ocean core from 1,000 kilometres away from the crater candidate - and the entire core, except for the top half-millimetre, consists of what she identifies as an impact tsunami layer, filled with impact glass displaying the flow textures characteristic of material that was simultaneously molten and airborne. Abbott now considers Burkle Crater a serious candidate for the Younger Dryas impact, pending geochronology results she was awaiting at the time of this recording. Learn more more on Cosmic Impacts below: https://cosmictusk.com/england-and-carolina-hit-by-tsunami-in-1014-ad/ Wally on the Younger Dryas Event: https://cosmictusk.com/wally-broecker-says-a-cosmic-impact-caused-the-younger-dryas/ www.cosmicsummit.live