At the end of 2022, an incredible study was published showing evidence that hominins, pre-dating the evolution of Homo sapiens, had braved the oceans to settle on the islands in the Mediterranean Sea.
This stunning conclusion was reached after researchers noted signs of pre-sapiens hominin activity on the Aegean Islands — even though these landmasses had been isolated from the mainland for almost half a million years.
The fact that pre-sapiens hominins had the awareness and resources to cross the ocean 450,000 years ago is a particularly stunning revelation when it comes to brain development. Although these findings do not necessarily mean our ancestors were constructing boats propelled by oars or sails, the archaeologist leading the study, Maria Gkioni, believes traversing the sea still required some relatively intricate planning.
Gkioni told Haaretz, “All this means that these hominins already had advanced cognitive capabilities. To cross over and colonize an island you need to have collaboration, a common language and complex communication.”
I have written about this study in a previous article focusing on these cognitive and social abilities, which seem to vastly exceed the previous common wisdom of how complex hominin behavior was at the time.
However, in this article I would like to focus more on the geographical importance of the Aegean Sea and how the inhabitants from millennia ago may have played an important role in developing the legends of ancient Greece and other mythical narratives we still tell to this day.
Setting Sail
The timeline of human evolution seems to get messier by the day as more studies are released showing the necessary relationship between overall intelligence and cranial volume is no longer a tenable hypothesis.
With more recent excavations showing small-brained hominins — like Homo naledi and Homo floresiensis — demonstrating culture while living alongside sapiens, we should be more open to the possibility that a technically non-human species on another branch of the evolutionary tree may have been technologically superior.
This should certainly be the case in light of this new study showing the capacity for seafaring before sapiens even split off from the hominin tree.
The lead geologist on the study, George Ferentinos, even admitted that this behavior could be even older in the Aegean Sea, as his research did not consider extrapolating further back in time due to the lack of data.
Ferentinos says his study didn’t go beyond the half-a-million-year mark because we don’t yet have reliable data for how the shorelines of Greece and Turkey looked like before then. However, he and his colleagues are convinced that the evidence for sea voyages by pre-sapiens hominins in the Aegean is strong and is also indirectly confirmed by the recent discovery of million-year-old prehistoric tools linked to Homo erectus in Spain.
This is earlier than other Erectus finds in Western and Eastern Europe, suggesting that hominins may have reached the Iberian Peninsula first by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, rather than by traveling by land from the east, Ferentinos says.
“Traditionally we think Erectus only left Africa through the Sinai Peninsula and then the Levant, but then we have to ask ourselves how they got to Spain before reaching the rest of Europe,” he says. “The most plausible solution is that they crossed at Gibraltar. I think we need to rethink what we know about human dispersal not just in Greece but around the world.”
What we have here in this study, and what will inform the rest of this article, is a simple scenario that is undeniable.
Pre-sapiens hominins understood the concept of utilizing an object as a means for transporting their body across a geographical area.
In other words, they had the ability to comprehend the idea of a vehicle.
As I’ve written about before, the island of Crete in the Aegean Sea is the main setting of the second book in the Sekret Machines series by Tom DeLonge and AJ Hartley, where they try to tell the full story behind the UFO phenomenon in a fictional way that they would not be able to otherwise.
Throughout the book, Minoan culture and its relation to Crete play a big part in the symbology of certain aspects regarding the phenomenon, hinting at qualities such as a hive mind through character interactions with an object known as the Malia Bee pendant.
These nods toward the history of the Minoans suggest that interactions with this assumed advanced intelligence behind these UFOs has been ongoing since that time.
We will come back to Crete in a minute, but first, we must explore what DeLonge has said about another part of the Mediterranean Sea involving these craft and their connection to this specific part of the world.
Anomalous Acts of War
On his show Unidentified, Tom DeLonge and Luis Elizondo travel to Italy and interview Italian military and intelligence officials about their experiences with the UFO phenomenon. The Italians inform the two that they had assembled over 13,000 cases of UFO incidents over the last 70 years.
However, the most interesting aspect of this visit was a story the Italians told about “spontaneous fires in northern Sicily that were caused by an electromagnetic beam, which they say came from the ocean.” Specifically, they say, “the bottom of the sea.”
Tom DeLonge elaborates on this trip to Italy on an episode of Steve-O’s Wild Ride, describing how the fires happened due to the apparent use of a microwave weapon coming from the UFO.
It’s not just a few things in the sky. It’s very, very big. I got brought over to Italy [and met] some dudes with Italian intelligence, and the Vatican and U.N.
They were all there when the military base had these briefings, and they showed me a map of the Mediterranean and what was happening on the coast of Sicily. All these apartments were catching on fire.
Like a microwave…some books…the couch [all spontaneously caught on fire].
So the government came in and they’re like, “What the fuck is going on here?” So they quarantine the area, get everyone to leave, and they’re going, “Why are things catching on fire?”
They detected these energy beams, energy weapons or something, that were coming off all the way out in the ocean, in the Mediterranean. So this dude was a colonel at the time and he was in charge, and they looked out and saw UFOs were out in the ocean fucking around.
So the head of the UFO program and the head of the Italian navy seals get on an unmarked civilian helicopter and just fly out to go see what’s going on out there. As they’re flying, a UFO pops out of the ocean and shoots their fucking helicopter down. I have the documents on the Italian intelligence letterhead.
I talked to the dude, the two dudes I was in the meeting with that were on the fucking helicopter. I have pictures of the helicopter being chased by the UFO and all the damage that was done to it, with some type of microwave weapon or something.
What they found out was that there were airplanes and other helicopters kind of in the area, but the UFO knew that those dudes were looking for him. It’s like they can read their minds…
So the map they showed me of the Mediterranean, they go, “These are all the hot spots of what’s happening with UFOs just recently.” There were hundreds of marks, hundreds all over the ocean. There are just things happening everywhere, every day. It’s fucking crazy.
From Tom’s story and interactions with the Italian government, we can say for sure that the Mediterranean is a UFO hotspot and clearly some of these craft have shown overt hostility to humans living in the area. According to Italian intelligence officials, these spontaneous fires happening in apartments were coming from a microwave weapon at the bottom of the ocean.
Keeping this story in mind, let us return to the Aegean Island of Crete and look at some of the peculiarities involved in the downfall of the Minoan civilization.
Illuminating Tablets
Considering once more that an archaeological excavation of Crete is the main setting and plot point of Tom DeLonge’s flagship explanation of the UFO phenomenon, it is important to examine the Minoan civilization and what symbology in their culture might reflect aspects of their interactions with it.
Once again, the Malia Bee pendant detailed in the book insinuates the existence of a hive mind The three discs hanging from the bees, and a fourth in the middle of them, suggest a relationship to a saucer-like craft.
There are also tablets from the excavation that are inscribed with Linear A, the scripted language of Minoan Crete, which emanate what can only be described as electromagnetic energy.
Unlike Linear B, which showed up on the Greek mainland shortly after and was the written script of the Mycenaean Bronze Age, Linear A—though it may have been one of the parent forms of the younger language which, in turn, gave rise to Classical Greek—had never been deciphered. It was a remarkable find, no doubt, but what it said neither Nicholas nor anyone else would ever know. And that was doubly unfortunate because Nicholas dearly wanted to wrest the tablet’s secrets from its ancient stone.
Because the other thing that struck him right away was the border that ran around the inscription. It was inlaid metal, a ribbon of some bluish material that looked like heat-tempered steel and, as he gazed at it, seemed to pulse with a faint but distinct radiance, so that Nicholas shut off the flashlight for a moment, and sat there in the dark to be sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him.
For a moment the blackness of the crypt seemed to swallow the stone up entirely, but then a bead of pearly iridescence winked on, coursing around the panel of text like a droplet of water. If not for the distinct blue tint, shimmering between teal, cobalt, and aquamarine, he would have thought it was mercury, quicksilver. It ran as if the tablet was being tipped and pivoted, making the seemingly liquid energy move and sparkle, but the stone was quite still, and the movement—or illusion of movement—seemed to come from the metal’s own peculiar energy.
This same energy was harnessed from a different tablet to enable the propulsion of a reverse-engineered craft piloted by another character later in the book. So Tom is clearly suggesting there is some kind of power related to these tablets that have to do with UFOs and electromagnetism.
So why are these relics lost to time, and what happened to the civilization that created them?
There are a few theories, including the Thera volcanic eruption and another group invading. However, a few interesting points turned up during my research hinting at something less obvious but potentially fitting.
Not Dead Yet
It has long been thought that the Minoans were wiped out by a natural disaster. Most believed it was the Thera volcanic eruption or the earthquake that preceded it. Others have proposed that it was a tsunami that destroyed Crete, which gives credence to the idea that the island was the basis for Plato’s Atlantis myth.
However, a 2019 study shows evidence that the Minoans continued to live on Crete long after they were thought to have disappeared. The destruction of the island is now thought to have been the result of a battle between the Minoans and the Myceneans, who eventually took over the island.
But these are still just hypotheses. A separate article in Haaretz notes that there are still several factors to consider and that an invasion causing the downfall of the Minoans on its own does not seem likely.
Archaeologists have found evidence of widespread destruction in the settlements of ancient Crete a generation or two after Thera’s eruption. How the devastation was caused has yet to be demonstrated.
Absent specific indicators, the cause could have been an earthquake, famine, attacks from mainland centers of ancient Greece, like Mycenae, or some combination of the above, though a wholescale invasion of marauding Mycenaean mainlanders as the central factor seems less likely.
So let’s pause for a moment and examine the implications here.
If Thera didn’t take out the Minoans, what did?
And what could have possibly caused the massive amount of fire damage shown in the archaeological record, if not lava from the eruption?
Perhaps a look at the evidence of Crete being engulfed in flames can provide a few clues.
Burn It Down
A 1999 paper on the destruction of the island details some important facts about the chaos.
“This event or events… marks the ruin of a high civilization based on large central buildings (conveniently called palaces), thriving coastal towns and complex rural estates”. Fire appears to have been the main agent in the LMIB destruction – traditionally dated to 1450 B.C., which affected most of the Bronze Age Minoan sites, especially those in eastern Crete, including Palaikastro.
So first off, fire is clearly the main culprit in the downfall of the Minoans. A few more odd details emerge as the story continues.
But even more interesting is the evidence that the Myceneans, who succeeded the Minoans on the island of Crete, “came in later, during the aftermath of the destruction, taking advantage of the severely weakened Minoan state.”
Both Demand and Hood see the presence of Mycenaeans at Knossos (the introduction of Linear B, Mycenaean style burials and grave goods, etc.) as “in harmony with the view that the horizon of fire-destruction in Crete in the Late Minoan IB reflects a war of conquest.”
However, it could be argued that the Mycenaeans came in later, during the aftermath of the destruction, taking advantage of the severely weakened Minoan state. Warren indicates that it was not until after the final fall of Knossos in the LMIIA2 period that the Mycenaeans gained significant control of the island.
If the Myceneans did not defeat the Minoans, and only came into power after this battle that resulted in the torching of Crete, then who the hell were the Minoans battling?
The facts here are hard to square with each other, but I think a few speculative questions are worth thinking about even if they sound completely absurd.
- How would such an advanced civilization, known for having the first navy in Europe and thought to have “come from somewhere else” because of their advancement compared with their surroundings, have just succumbed to the Myceneans?
- And why was there so much evidence of destruction by fire if a natural disaster did not wipe them out?
- Could the conflicts with the Myceneans, as posited by archaeologists, actually have been a conflict with an even more advanced civilization?
- Would this be an underwater-based civilization that only a navy would encounter?
- And, perhaps, a civilization with technology such as microwave weapons that could spontaneously start fires?
Considering reports of UFOs have been consistent over millennia, this may not be such a big leap when taking into account the fact that our ancestors understood the concept of vehicles half a million years ago.
Look at what Homo sapiens have done in the past 100 years. Consider the cognitive capabilities of other hominins and the fact that brain size is no longer considered a deciding factor in intelligence.
In the present day, the Mediterranean Sea is a hotspot for UFOs and these craft shooting microwave weapons from under the ocean were confirmed by Italian intelligence, off the coast of Sicily.
It seems like the possibility of the Minoan civilization being taken out by a more advanced species of hominin using microwave weapons is one of the most absurd theories one could come up with.
But what else could cause the extent of the fire damage seen on the island of Crete and the downfall of the most advanced civilization in Europe, if not a natural disaster?
I’m open to any ideas, but there’s a lot we still have to learn about the Minoans to be absolutely sure, and it goes without saying that I’m sure as hell looking forward to the third and final installment of the Sekret Machines trilogy.
