Schoch, Robert M.

Published June 11, 2010

Robert M. Schoch is a Yale scholar, geologist and paleontologist. At the invitation of John Anthony West, he agreed to inspect the Sphinx and offer an opinion on the nature of the erosion to be seen on it. He found that the cause of this erosion was precipitation rather than windblown sand. As Egypt has had an arid climate for many thousands of years, Dr Schoch reached the conclusion that at least the front of the Sphinx had been carved between 7000 and 5000 BC, when the climate had been considerably wetter.

In the same book, Voices of the Rocks ^[454], he endorsed (p.123) the conclusions of Mary Settegast ^[545] who claimed that Plato’s Atlantis story was a reference to the Magdalenian culture that inhabited the coastal regions of the Western Mediterranean during the 9^th millennium BC. Schoch devotes a chapter to the subject of Atlantis and interestingly lists a number of sites to which the Greeks applied the appellation ‘Pillars of Heracles‘ apart from the Strait of Gibraltar.

“The Greeks, however, used the name Pillars of Herakles to mark other sites besides Gibraltar, some outside the Mediterranean – namely, the Canary Islands in the Atlantic and the Strait of Kerch dividing the Black Sea from the Sea of Azov – and even more inside – specifically, the Strait of Bonifacio between Corsica and Sardinia, the Strait of Messina between mainland Italy and Sicily, the Greek Peloponnese, the mountainous coast of Tunisia, and the Nile Delta.” ^[p.87] A highly critical review of Schoch’s ‘Voices’ can be read online⁽ⁿ⁾.

In his Voyages of the Pyramid Builders ^[455], he reiterates his conviction “that Plato’s story is, at least in part, a fictionalized account of a great Mediterranean war at a time of intense climatic change between the tenth and eighth millennia BC.” A critique by William P Eigles tackles ‘Voyages’ in Atlantis Rising magazine # 37, where Schoch endeavours to link the global presence of pyramids as a possible expression of hyperdiffusion. Eigles comments that Schoch “may simply be trying to prove too much here. Many of the motivations, reasons and interpretations he offers for the various activities and actions on the part of the ancients are clearly speculative in nature.^(ad)”

This 1990 declaration regarding the Sphinx generated an international reputation for Schoch. Such a controversial conclusion was obviously greeted warmly by the supporters of the 9,000-year-old date for Atlantis allegedly given by the Egyptian priests to Solon. This accidental intervention by Schoch in the debate regarding the dating of Atlantis has unfortunately done nothing to resolve the issue. Fierce debate continues regarding the date of the Sphinx. However, there appears to be a gradual acceptance of Schoch’s views by other professional geologists such as David Coxhill. Another geologist, Colin Reader, while not accepting all of Schoch’s conclusions, believes that the Sphinx predates King Khufu, the father of Khafre, who has been traditionally accepted as the builder of the Sphinx, with the monument bearing his image^(v)(w)(x).

Schoch subsequently pushed the date of the Sphinx as far back as circa 10,000 BCE and he now suggests that the monument was carved in the shape of a lioness.^(ae)

>>It appears that Schoch’s experiences regarding the Sphinx have whetted his appetite for prehistorical controversies and then wrote two further books, again with R.A. McNally, about the origins of the pyramid builders in Voyages of the Pyramid Builders^[^455] and Pyramid Quest ^[^456], both of which were met with mixed reviews¹. The authors “trace the many pyramid-building cultures back to what may be their ultimate source: Sundaland, a continent-sized stretch of land in Southeast Asia (located under the current southern reach of the South China Sea) that was inundated by rising sea levels after the end of the last ice age, a catastrophic event that may have been connected to cometary activity in the skies observed by the inhabitants of Sundaland.

As we argue in our book, pyramids are symbolically connected with comets, and the Sundalanders may well have originated the ancient pyramid tradition, then carried it with them as they fled the rising waters. Those who went northwest contributed to the cultural mélange that gave rise first to the pyramid cultures of Sumeria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia and later to those in India, Southeast Asia, and China. Sundalanders heading east may have gotten as far as Peru, where pyramids rose at Aspero at the end of the fourth millennium B.C. The American pyramid tradition died out until it was reinvigorated, from the twelfth century B.C. on, by Pacific Rim mariners, primarily Chinese. This contact contributed to the pyramid building of the Olmecs, which spread across Mesoamerica and later into the Andes.”^(aj)<<

Unfortunately, he includes a reference to Ireland’s Newgrange as a form of ‘pyramid building’, an idea I reject, since it shares neither form nor function with the Egyptian pyramids. The goodreads.com website offers a very critical review of this book^(a)as has the late Professor Garrett Fagan^(ag).

Schoch and McNally have recently dared to enter into the highly charged debate regarding the dating of the Great Pyramid at Giza^[⁴⁵⁶^][⁴⁵⁷^].

Schoch seems to be venturing further and further from his natural comfort zone of geology. In 2007, he wrote an article on Telepathy^(d)and was later due to address the Electric Universe Conference in Las Vegas in 2012^(c) and deliver a paper entitled The Catastrophic Termination of the Last Ice Age. In it, he will claim that around 10,000 BC the Earth underwent ‘dramatic catastrophic changes’ as a result of ‘our unstable Sun erupting at the end of the last Ice Age, melting the extensive glaciers and triggering climate warming. The full paper should be an interesting read. He continues to argue against the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis^(r).

His retreat from conventional science may be now complete as he delves into the strange world of lycanthropy (the study of werewolves)^(o).

Schoch’s work is now promoted through his own website^(b), which includes a wide range of articles. On it, both he and his associate, Colette Dowell, have been very critical of the Bosnian pyramid claims of Semir Osmanagic following a visit there in 2006. However, in what appears to be an article^(l) written in 2011 or 2012, Osmanagic responds with scathing criticism of Schoch’s work. His attack on Schoch was later added to by an assault from Jock Doubleday in a very lengthy article^(y) in which, among other matters, he accuses Schoch of a series of thirteen lies! I should perhaps mention that Doubleday has been featured for some years now in the burgeoning Encyclopedia of American Loons^(z). As well as that, elsewhere, a very personal attack has also been made on Collette Dowell^(aa). Support for Schoch’s claim of a Bosnian pyramid hoax is also available^(ab).

Schoch has now turned his attention to the emergence and demise of very early civilisations, before that of dynastic Egypt or Sumeria. When he combined his early date for the Sphinx with other discoveries such as that of Nabta Playa and Göbekli Tepe and Gunung Padang^(m), he concluded that the origins of civilisation go back much further than generally accepted. He then looked at the bigger and perhaps more important question of the cause of their collapse. In a 2009 special edition (N0.8) of New Dawn magazine, he speculated on the possibility that the ending of such early civilisations was caused by the earth’s encounter with one or more asteroids or comets.

In his book^(f), Forgotten Civilization^[867], Schoch claims that coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the sun around 9700 BC devastated our planet with electrical discharges, triggering seismic and volcanic activity as well as ending the Ice Age with its consequent floods. All this ‘eradicated the civilisation of the time and set humanity back thousands of years, only to re-emerge around 3500 BC with scattered memories and nascent abilities.’ In an article written^(g) in March 2012, Schoch wrote about the ‘Carrington Event’ of 1859 which resulted from a massive solar event that year.

Schoch’s paper had the somewhat disturbing title of ‘Death Star’ and perhaps even more unsettling was the revelation in March 2019 that evidence of at least three major solar ‘proton attacks’ over the past 3,000 years. The suggestion is that these episodes are to be expected with some degree of regularity, which may create ever-increasing disruption as our dependency on electricity expands. The recent report^(q) indicates that the most powerful event identified so far took place around 610 BC. Without a power grid to damage at the time, we are unaware of what effect it had on the people of that time and I would hope that a review of the literature of that era might reveal some corroboration.

A video clip from his recent Las Vegas lecture is now available on YouTube^(h). His talk is based on an article⁽ⁱ⁾ in the July-August 2010 edition of New Dawn magazine, which is now available online and will play a large part in his Forgotten Civilization. He highlights some fascinating similarities between the Rongorongo script of Easter Island, the Nasca petroglyphs and the plasma figures of Dr Anthony L. Peratt together with their possible association with the ending of the last Ice Age.

For me, the most disturbing aspect of Schoch’s book is his apocalyptic vision of global catastrophes that he anticipates may again turn the few survivors back into troglodytes!

“The revised and expanded edition of Forgotten Civilization, which bears a new subtitle, was released in March of 2021. It includes everything in the first edition plus a new final chapter and various updates to other chapters throughout the book. Thus, the new edition is approximately 150 pages longer, including over 40 new/additional photographs. As I detail in this revision, a number of new discoveries made since the first edition was published reinforce my contention that true civilization existed prior to the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago, and that civilization was decimated by the solar outburst(s) that occurred then, throwing humanity into a Solar-Induced Dark Age for some 6,000 years before the reemergence of civilization around 4000–3000 BCE.”^(ai)

However, Jason Colavito has reviewed Schoch’s claims relating to both the Rongorongo script^(j) and Göbekli Tepe^(k) and has found his ideas wanting. Colavito found further ammunition in the forthcoming book, Origins of the Sphinx^[1374], which Schoch co-authored with Robert Bauval, describing it as ‘a virtual rewriting of’ Keeper of Genesis^(p). In 2019, Schoch expanded further on his opinions regarding the importance of Göbekli Tepe with a claim that its builders possessed some level of literacy^(s), provoking further criticism from Colavito^(r). Schoch expanded on this claim in a subsequent post^(ac), but for me, I find this proposed literacy at Göbekli Tepe a push too far.

One of the great mysteries of Göbekli Tepe is that it was deliberately reburied but fortunately for us, this left it in perfect condition for us to study. Schoch has suggested that this was done to protect it from damage by CME’s such as occurred around 9700 BC (see above). This sounds like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. He then takes this idea further and proposes in a lengthy article that the Egyptians did something similar^(ah), but uncovered them later for the pharaohs to develop. I’m not convinced.

ORACUL – The Organization for the Research of Ancient Cultures is a not-for-profit body, co-founded by Schoch “dedicated to the scientific study of civilization’s origins. It is our hope that through research advocacy, publishing, and educational outreach, further evidence for mankind’s remote and forgotten past will be uncovered.”^(af)

^(a) Greg’s review of Voyages of the Pyramid Builders (goodreads.com)

^(b) https://robertschoch.com/

^(c)https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/

^(d) https://web.archive.org/web/20160805112624/https://atlantisrisingmagazine.com/article/telepathy-a-sympathy-of-souls/

^(e)https://web.archive.org/web/20160121150912/https://www.robertschoch.com/articles/schochnewdawnjune2009.pdf

^(f)https://www.amazon.co.uk/Forgotten-Civilization-Solar-Outbursts-Future/dp/1594774978

^(g) https://dailygrail.com/Guest-Articles/2012/3/Death-Star

^(h) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUqdYBxbbck

⁽ⁱ⁾ https://web.archive.org/web/20160305085118/https://robertschoch.com/articles/schochancientwarningnewdawnjuly2010.pdf

^(j)https://robertschoch.com/plasma_iceage.html

^(k) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/1/post/2012/08/robert-schochs-wacky-easter-island-gobekli-tepe-theory-the-hypocrisy-of-alternative-dating.html

^(l) HOW MANY TIMES HAS DR. ROBERT SCHOCH BEEN WRONG? – Welcome to the official web page of the ‘Archaeological Park: Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun’ Foundation / Dobrodošli na službenu web stranicu Fondacije ‘Arheološki park: Bosanska piramida Sunca’al Park: Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation (archive.org) *