No, it’s not that the Winter Olympics are going to be held on Moel Famau due to climate change. It’s more complex than that and concerns the history lessons that you won’t find in your old school textbooks. If you are interested in alternative music, poetry and culture then you may find the work of some of these alternative historians interesting. They are not specialists, but very keen, intelligent amateurs who have researched their subjects in way that could be described as, “thinking outside of the box”, and challenges the established view of world history. Many of these researchers have concluded that December 2012 will be of major significance to our Earth, heralding the end of this “Great Year” and the beginning of a new “Great Year” (26,000 years), with the worst-case scenario bringing a major cataclysm.

So what is this period of 26,000 years, called the Great Year, when was it discovered and why have I only recently found out about its existence (I’m now 62)? My voyage of discovery began when, in my early 20’s I read ‘Chariots of the Gods’ by Erich Von Daniken. On the back cover of his book is this sentence :- “All over the world there are fantastic ruins and improbable objects which cannot be explained by conventional theories of history, archaeology and religion.” I was totally fascinated by this information about the ancient ruin sites around the world, but I remained sceptical about his main theme that god was an astronaut or an extra terrestrial being. Work and family matters then swallowed up my time and I didn’t follow up on Von Daniken’s theories.

I re-joined this voyage of discovery in my mid-fifties, quite by accident. I was browsing through the shelves of a bookshop when I picked up ‘Fingerprints of the Gods’ by Graham Hancock. Once I had opened the book I couldn’t put it down. Hancock opened my eyes to a different reality. Lots of historical data, which to me didn’t seem to hang true, were re-examined using the latest technology and a totally different outlook on ancient history evolved. He proposed that the Great Pyramid at Giza was not the tomb of the Pharaoh Khufu, more an observatory, which related to the passage of time over many millennia.

Another proposition related to the mathematical ratios of the dimensions of the pyramid corresponding to the dimensions of the planet Earth. In other words the great pyramid is a mathematical representation of the Earth. Together with the two smaller pyramids, the three correspond exactly to the position of the 3 stars of Orion’s Belt in the night sky several millennia before the present time.

Hancock also showed that by using similar data from the pyramid, the “precessional cycle” period could be found. What is the precessional cycle? The Earth not only rotates on its axis, one rotation every day of 24hours, it also has a slight wobble; much like a spinning top which starts to wobble as it slows down. The wobble is so slow that to complete one rotation of wobble takes 26,000 years - hence the ”Great Year”. This has subsequently been verified by NASA space agency, USA. Using archaeo-astronomy Hancock also predicted a rare alignment of the planets in the solar system in 2012 bringing abnormally high gravitational pressure to bear on the earth. Walter Cruttenden in his book ‘Lost Star’ suggests that the calculations of many astro–physicists indicate that for the earth to wobble as it does our sun must be part of a binary star system that exerts a gravitational force on the Earth. This is apparent as the star’s orbits close in, then move away.

Now for the spooky bit. Over in South America there are a large number of massive structures that are attributed to the Mayan culture. These structures have an inbuilt coding system, very similar to the great pyramid system and are similarly aligned with a star system as it was, several millennia ago.

There was an added bonus for the modern day Indiana Jones’ - the South American structures, often found in dense jungle areas, had not suffered from ‘tomb-robbers’ in the same way that the Egyptian sites had. When the Mayan sites were opened in the late 20th century some of them contained coded writings. Maurice M Cotterell, in his book ‘The Super Gods’ has decoded some of these ancient scripts and believes that the Mayan calendar ends on the 21st December 2012. More importantly, he states that a section of the script recorded sunspot activity over several millennia and that a distinct pattern had emerged. This pattern had been projected to 2012, when it is predicted that there will be abnormally high sunspot and solar flair activity. This has also been verified by NASA, who added that these exceptionally violent flares will increase the power of the solar wind reaching the earth.

Where does all of this leave the rest of Earth’s inhabitants? Scientists around the world are already registering a massive drop in the Earth’s magnetic field, (see ‘Pole Shift’ by John White) raising the question “what effect will the massive magnetic storms from the sun flares, the abnormally strong gravitational pull of the other planets, and the binary star have on an already weakened Earth defence system?”

Current TV documentaries have made us aware of the “event” 65 million years ago when a massive comet/meteorite struck the earth, killing off the dinosaurs together with over 90% of all other life on the planet. However, the two most recent “events” are still being investigated. Most of us are aware of the biblical story of Noah and the ark, but Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, in their book ‘Uriels Machine’ tell of many other totally unconnected cultures around the globe that have a flooding catastrophe within their folklore. Their research indicates that there were two major flooding events in the recent past; one around 7640 BC and the other around 3150 BC. Both events were caused by comet/meteorite strikes in the oceans, producing tsunami waves, hundreds of metres high, which wiped out a high percentage of life on earth. Mount Tryfan in Snowdonia, North Wales, bears the evidence, with beds of sand, gravel and sea shells found over 400 metres above sea level. Patrick Geryl in his book ‘The World Cataclysm in 2012?’ also claims to have translated Mayan scripts and his interpretation signals a major world catastrophe. Consequently, he is gathering a group of people together in the high mountains of South Africa, which he has identified as the best place for survival, being well inland and well above the height of the worst possible tsunami.

That brings us back to the original question, ‘What’s happening in 2012?’ This can only be answered by testing the evidence and hypotheses presented by the authors mentioned. Each researcher/author presents a different and independent spectrum of the scenario, but there is a general consensus that December 2012 could be the start of another cycle of life and death on the planet, as has always occurred over millions of years. It would take an official enquiry to evaluate all of the evidence and arrive at a conclusion, and even then perhaps no ‘one’ outcome would be agreed upon. So I will just prepare to spend Christmas with my family as usual, and will accept that I can’t change the future - whatever it may bring.