Andrew Collins Promotes "Cygnus Key" by Doubling Down on Lost, Advanced Denisovan Civilization Claim

​Back in January, I reviewed Andrew Collins’s new book The Cygnus Key (Part 1 and Part 2), which was recently published, based on the publisher’s galley proofs. I found the book to be a poorly reasoned effort to imagine a lost white race of godlike ancestors, this time identified with the Denisovans, a poorly understood species or subspecies of human. The publisher had placed the proofs on their online press site, but my review must not have gone over well with either Collins or the publisher, or both, since they pulled the galleys within hours of my review going up. Well, the book is now out and Collins is busy promoting the volume. To that end, he prepared a teaser article that he has circulated on a number of fringe websites, including Graham Hancock’s, over the past three weeks. It’s a doozy, but one that tells us a lot about Collins’s thinking.

​Even though Collins is a regular on Ancient Aliens, he poses as a reasonable analyst of ancient history. But take a look at how he really thinks about the past. Look in wonder at his discussion of what he thinks are equally plausible explanations for ancient architecture:

Two popular theories seem to provide answers. One is that civilization arose as a result of the survivors of sunken Atlantis reaching foreign shores, bringing with them remnants of their high technology. The result of this influx of new ideas was the rise of great civilizations on both sides of the Atlantic. This was the proposal originally of Ignatius Donnelly in his classic work Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882). A second solution is that the greatest civilizations on earth arose through either direct or indirect intervention from aliens, the premise of Erich von Däniken’s global bestseller Chariots of the Gods (1968), which remains influential today.
 
Aside from these two theories, the alternative has been to assume that civilization began as a result of the independent invention of advanced human behavior during the Upper Palaeolithic age, circa 45,000-9600 BCE. These advancements led, finally, to the Neolithic revolution in Anatolia and the Near East around 10,500 years ago, and thereafter the rise of great civilizations such as Sumer, Egypt, China, and that of the Indus Valley. This, of course, is the currently held view of archaeologists and prehistorians alike.
 
Yet today we are presented with a fourth alternative, which is that civilization was gifted to us by an advanced human society that had developed an increased level of human behavior even before the majority of our ancestors had made their departure from Africa around 45,000-55,000 years ago.

These are not equally plausible alternatives, nor does the popularity of an idea make it correct. It’s also probably worth noting that Collins doesn’t seem entirely aware of the origin of the ideas he describes. Donnelly was not the first to propose that Atlantis gave rise to civilization. Brasseur de Bourbourg had done it before him, and many authors before that, going back to the Spanish writers who attempted to describe America in Classical terms in the 1500s. Similarly, von Däniken was not the first ancient astronaut theorist, though Collins doesn’t actually say that he was. He seems to give von Däniken’s views equal billing with more earthbound views in large measure because he is a contribute to Ancient Aliens, where von Däniken is a producer.
 
The remainder of the article is a summary of Collins’s book, which I have already reviewed. Suffice it to say that in the promotional piece Collins offers no new arguments that make any more convincing his claim that the white Denisovans hybridized dark-skinned Homo sapiens to bequeath to them magic powers of math, architecture, and myth.

​You might also have seen that another member of Graham Hancock’s extended circle of friends, Robert Bauval, was the subject of a mostly ignored YouTube video and some online claims accusing him of plagiarizing the Orion Correlation Theory from the work of J. J. Hurtak, a fringe figure who wrote some strange books of religious mysticism. Hurtak has a penchant for self-aggrandizement, inflating his credentials and founding his own international organization to spread his message, but this is neither here nor there. In the 1970s, he wrote a book called The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch, and it turns out that he did indeed refer obliquely to the idea that the pyramids of Giza—well, one of them—were aligned to Orion:

…we will understand why the ancient Egyptian texts refer to Ihm-‘sk and why the Great Pyramid was aligned with Mintaka (delta), Alnilam (epsilon), and Alnitak (zeta) in Tak-Orion (Orionis). These are the central threshold controls or the region of “positive programming” used by the Elohim Lords of Light to connect the many galaxies to our Father universe. Within our galactic quadrant, these threshold controls are necessary in coordinating celestial navigation between universes. Through the energies of Orion, the Central Threshold Control, the higher beings of Light move across the waters of the deep.

​In context, though, he is speaking about the Watchers from the Book of Enoch and is suggesting that the Great Pyramid was physically positioned to target the stars to receive special rays. This isn’t quite the same as Bauval’s idea, which grew instead out of Robert Temple’s earlier efforts to argue that ancient Egyptian cities were positioned to map the constellation Argo across Egypt.
 
Hurtak claimed that Enoch had told him that Orion was the “celestial pyramid” and the double of the Great Pyramid. He also said that the Great Pyramid stood on a vortex of magnetic fields from the sky, earth, and the underworld met and therefore could serve as a portal to let the “energy vehicles” of the Watchers cross over to our plane to spark the “next step” in human evolution.
 
So, basically, it’s not the same. Apparently Bauval told Hurtak that he didn’t see the similarity, though he had read Hurtak’s work and declined to make use of it.