Best selling author Graham Hancock spoke about his latest book, Supernatural, which delves into the origins of humankind and the wisdom he gleaned from experiences with shamans in South America. Something altered human consciousness around 40,000 years ago, and Hancock suspects it could have been an interaction with supernatural or other-dimensional beings. The ancient depiction of such beings resembles the grey aliens of today, and he suggested they may be the same entities.

During trips to the Amazon rainforest, under the tutelage of tribal shamans, Hancock said he drank a hallucinogenic brew called Ayahuasca on 11 different occasions. He reported being transported into a "very convincing reality" where he telepathically communicated with intelligent beings. He also experimented with the substance ibogaine, which seemingly allowed him to get into contact with the dead. The artist Pablo Amaringo has depicted some of the Ayahuasca-fueled visions of Peruvian shamans in his paintings. Click here to view a sampling.

Hancock also discussed how the Nobel Prize winning scientist Francis Crick admitted to being in an altered state when he discovered the double helix form (Crick used LSD back when it was legal in the 1950's). Interestingly, Crick suggested that DNA didn't evolve on our own planet because it was too complicated to have emerged by accident. Rather, it may have arrived here via a type of panspermia, sent out by a dying high-tech civilization in the form of frozen bacteria on spaceships, Hancock recounted.