Graham Hancock - BBC Horizon Controversy

BBC Horizon Controversy

BBC 2's Horizon TV series broadcast a programme, Atlantis Reborn, on 4 November 1999 that challenged the ideas presented by Hancock. It detailed one of Hancock's claims that the arrangement of an ancient temple complex was designed to mirror astronomical features and attempted to demonstrate that the same thing could be done with perhaps equal justification using famous landmarks in New York. It also alleged that Hancock had selectively moved or ignored the locations of some of the temples to fit his own theories (see below).

Hancock claimed he was misrepresented by the programme, and he and Robert Bauval made complaints to the Broadcasting Standards Commission against the way Horizon had portrayed them and their work. Eight points were raised by Hancock, two by Bauval (one of which duplicated a complaint of Hancock's). This included the complaint that:

The programme attempted to create the impression that he was an intellectual fraudster who had put forward half baked theories and ideas in bad faith, and that he was incompetent to defend his own arguments.

The BSC dismissed all but one of the complaints. Overall, the BSC concluded that "the programme makers acted in good faith in their examination of the theories of Mr Hancock and Mr Bauval". The complaint which was upheld was that

The programme unfairly omitted one of their arguments in rebuttal of a speaker who criticised the theory of a significant correlation between the Giza pyramids and the belt stars of the constellation Orion (the "correlation theory")

which the Commission did find to be unfair. That speaker was the astronomer Edwin Krupp. Krupp accused Bauval of fudging the maps of Orion and the Pyramids by placing them upside down in order to make the theory work. In interviews filmed in the later and modified Horizon documentary Atlantis Reborn Again shown on 14 December 2000, Hancock and Bauval provided detailed rebuttals to Krupp and argued that the ancient Egyptians had made the Pyramids correlate in the most obvious and intuitive manner with the three stars of Orion's Belt, that Orion could only be seen at the highest point in the sky by the Egyptians looking in a southward direction and a work of symbolic and religious art. A counter argument was provided on Atlantis Reborn Again to Bauval and Hancock's responses to Krupp's statements.

According to Graham Hancock, Krupp's criticism was rejected by two prominent British astronomers, Dr. Percy Seymour of Plymouth University and Dr. Archie Roy, professor Emeritus at Glasgow University.