Exploring Ancient Mysteries of Egypt

Egypt is absolutely a mystical and magical place, rife with ancient secrets, enigmatic mysteries, and friendly people who welcome visitors with open arms. With many countries around the world still barring foreigners from touching their soil as continued fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, Egypt is wide open and completely safe. I highly recommend you go, and here’s why — my experience there was absolutely life changing. I will never look at the universe the same way again.

Where to start? I have an entire 14-day travel blog posted to the Member Site of the Connected Universe Portal, but let me give you some highlights. First of all, I was on the Return of the Kheper Cycle tour hosted by Mohamed Ibrahim of Guide of Egypts tours and my good friend Jonny Enoch who many will recognize as my co-star from The Alaska Triangle and several shows on the Gaia network. Mohamed’s team is an absolute class act. From the moment you step off the plane in Cairo you are greeted with a friendly smile by his right hand man, Usama, and Usama literally walks you through everything. This is huge for someone traveling internationally for the first time or has never been to Cairo. After Usama takes care of you at the airport, he places you with a driver who diligently takes you to the hotel where more of Mohamed’s team checks you in. It was the smoothest experience I’ve ever had checking into anything before.

Our first several nights were spent at the Steigenberger Pyramids Hotel which sits right across from the Giza Pyramids. All I had to do was open the curtains and there the pyramids loomed outside my window. I spent quite a bit of the hotel time out on the balcony writing with the pyramids as my backdrop.

We wasted no time in diving straight into the action. On the very first morning, the very first thing we found ourselves doing was climbing down into the “Bent” Pyramid. Note for next time… hit the Stair Master before leaving for Egypt. Nicole and I do quite a bit of walking throughout the day, but I wasn’t really prepared for the descent, then climb up a series of stairs and passages (then do it all in reverse once we’d looked around). I was winded, but it was a fantastic way to start the entire tour, really just a prelude of what was to come in the following days.

Saqqara was even more impressive the second day as we ventured in the Step pyramid and then the Serapeum after lunch. But that magical third day… this is what the Return of the Kheper Cycle was all about: the beginning of the new sun cycle starting on the summer solstice. And where were we on the summer solstice? We were inside the Great Pyramid of Giza for two whole hours, just our group. Talk about amazing! We were able to climb down into the subterranean chamber, which is normally off limits, accessed the Queen’s Chamber, up into Grand Gallery, and of course the King’s Chamber. The entire complex is fascinating with plenty of secrets to unravel, and it’s within the King’s Chamber that I noticed something rather peculiar. You can watch a myriad of videos, look at photos, read books… but until you’re actually viewing these places yourself it’s just not the same. This box that mainstream academia likes to call a sarcophagus did not close like other sarcophagi. It had some sort of lid, for sure, but it’s lid was different than anything else we’ve seen.

We continued around the Giza plateau following the pyramid and later visited the Sphinx. All the while, Mohamed was pointing out discrepancies in the technology that would have been used to actually create these structures and what the mainstream has passed off as a story. My dad’s occupation was as a machinist, a tool and die maker, by trade, and he maintains a rather significant shop in his basement where he has turned his attention to woodcraft. By proxy, I can certainly see where there must have been some kind of skilled machining in the ancient world. We’ll get deeper into that another time.

The following day was a bit more relaxed as we hit the Civilization Museum to see the royal mummies as well as a Coptic church carved into a cave, and then we flew down to Aswan where a seven day Nile Cruise awaited us. It was a fantastic strategy. Use the boat as a home base for a week while we visited all the temples up and down the Nile River.

The day we flew in we started with the temple at Philae which had been moved when they built the Aswan high dam. The following day we visited Elephantine Island which was an unexpected surprise for me. I hadn’t recalled it on the original itinerary, but it was some place I’d always wanted to visit with it’s legends as a possible holding place for the Ark of the Covenant (some think it’s still there). This was the first time I’d crossed paths with The Ark (and I was wearing a hat everyone told me looked like Indiana Jones). There are also stories there about stargates (we encountered these several times) and Egyptian depictions of Mayan headdresses. We concluded the day at Kom-Omni temple and the crocodile mummy museum.

Ancient Secrets of Elephantine Island video:

From there, much is a majestic blur. Esna, Luxor, and Karnak temples all in one day, Abydos and Dendera, Edfu… These are all covered in detail in the travel blogs, but a few highlights…

If you can successfully sneak doing it, go around the backside of the broken obelisk and Karnak, put your ear to it, and slap it. You’ll hear the resonance resound from within. If you can get access to the Sekmet statue do that as well. The eyes are amazing and appear to glow, gazing into your soul. Of course Abydos has the controversial glyphs that appear to be vehicles from today’s day and age, and it additionally has the Osirion outback with the “Flower of Life” inscription. Dendera… the home of the Egyptian “lightbulb.” It’s not a straight up, physical lightbulb, but it does signify energy, and is amazing when you get a peek at it. There are three of these “bulbs,” by the way. The sheer height of the structure is what amazed me, with all the fantastic Hathor sculptures adorning the columns, unfortunately defaced in antiquity (the next time you want to deface a modern statue look at how frustrated we are that the ancients defaced theirs!). We also got access to a newly-opened crypt, first group inside to an area that had been off-limits for 20 years. And with the fresh chisel marks in the walls with large chunks of friezes missing, we can plainly see what they were doing for 20 years. And then Edfu… so much to see there, but things really got interesting when Mohamed and Jonny were having a nice back and forth dialog about the Atlantis origin story on the walls. That conversation in its entirety is a special feature in the Member Site.

After a slower day visiting the Nubian Museum (which contained important early history artifacts) and actually visiting a Nubian village for tea, we flew back up to Cairo… but not without a six hour delay at the airport. I’ll give Egypt Air props, however, since they gave us free food and drink while we waited.

Our final day together was spent back in Cairo visiting the fantastic Cairo Museum and then spending some time shopping in the Cairo markets. Like the other museums, the Cairo Museum has some important pieces with secrets hiding in plain sight like the schist disk, the sarcophagus with the failed cut on the backside, the giant coffin, and more. With its plethora of sarcophagi, it’s where I performed a massive search for any box similar to the one in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid… and found none.

These are just some of the highlights of an amazing two week excursion to Egypt! For full details, check out the Travel Blog and the Special Features section of the Connected Universe Portal Member Site! Get started with a 30-day free trial!