People think I'm a freemason, and I'm not. People think I believe the end of the world is coming on 21 December 2012, and I don't.
Many people say I believe aliens built the pyramids. I don't. In fact I'm not a supporter of the 'ancient alien' hypothesis at all. I think a lost human civilization is a much better explanation of the mysteries and paradoxes of ancient cultures.
I'm somebody who explores extraordinary possibilities, not ordinary ones.
I'm not an academic; I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a writer, communicating ideas to the public. There is a model of how the past is, and a lot of academic archaeology is about refining the model. It's not about changing the model radically. I'm not aware of any current which is about radically changing the model. It's just me, really.
I see myself as a journalist reporting neglected stories about our past and trying to bring rigor, reason and intuition to the quest.
It's odd that invoking the possibility of alien influences should itself be a sign of madness. I don't see the need for it to explain history on earth, but I can't see any reason why the universe shouldn't be full of life.
Whether Earth was deliberately terraformed, in other words, or whether it was seeded with the spores of life from crashed comets or whether, indeed, life arose here spontaneously and accidentally, it is reasonable to hope that we might find traces of the same kind of process on Mars.
