Telling 'The Greatest Story Never Told'
Ancient aliens and rants against sugar
In the first paragraph of the ninth chapter in her magnum-opus, The Greatest Story Never Told: A Scientific Inquiry into the Evidence of the Fall of Man from a Higher Civilization in Antiquity (1988), Dr. Lana Cantrell finally comes clean: “This will take a lot of explaining.”
It’s an understatement.
Her book about the ‘real’ prehistory of Earth clocks in at over 1,000 pages—the culmination of eight years of doctoral research into humanity’s arcane origins. Despite the current popularity of shows like Ancient Aliens, Dr. Cantrell is not widely-known today; but her early analysis of the emerging ‘ancient astronaut’ theory was original when first published, and has yet to be replicated in its scope or vision.
Dr. Lana CantrellAfter studying primary sources from ancient civilizations around the world, Dr. Cantrell identified a consistent, unifying narrative: “All texts speak of a Fall from a purer form.” Overlapping stories suggested that the current iteration of society was the result of genetic tampering and radiation poisoning inflicted upon our ancestors by a race of extraterrestrial beings. These ETs were later immortalized as ‘gods’ and chronicled in legends across cultures.
As a student of medicine, Cantrell rummaged through the earliest religious documents from Sumer to India in search of “biological evidence” to support this version of history. According to her research, the extraterrestrial interlopers came from a planet called Nibiru, had green-colored skin, and “their blood was more like chlorophyll.” These predecessors mixed their genes with Earth’s native residents and started a lineage of advanced humans that enjoyed longer lifespans, larger bodies and a higher level of consciousness.
The one-of-a-kind cover for Dr. Cantrell’s bookThe party ended around 450,000 years ago when globe-spanning nuclear wars were fought between these ancient alien ‘gods.’ The fallout from their battles created a highly toxic environment that was detrimental to life on Earth. Increased radiation led to hormonal imbalances, crop mutation and drastic physical changes. These events rapidly deteriorated the human condition and, in Dr. Cantrell’s opinion, precipitated man’s descent to a lower stage of development.
Dr. Lana Cantrell believes that our ancient ancestors possessed forms of advanced technology. She references the above hieroglyphics as evidences, stating that the symbols “look very much like a ship and the disc with some electromagnetic energy denoted.”Beyond the Erich von Däniken / Zecharia Sitchin themes, the highlights of Cantrell’s masterpiece are arguably her moments of unfiltered criticism and sharp commentary about the contemporary ‘Western’ way of life. She spends chapters openly lamenting how “mankind is such a failure,” and doesn’t refrain from providing pages full of examples.
As proof that man has fallen “from a higher civilization in antiquity,” Cantrell cites a host of perceived social maladies, including, but not limited to:
“Academia”
“refined sugar”
“women's liberation propaganda” and
“eroticism”
She blames the latter on famous pioneers of sexuality research, Masters and Johnson and Dr. Ruth, “who play on the baseness of man and are getting rich over it.”
Connecting these behaviors to dietary changes, Cantrell alleges that “the major reason promiscuousness is done [is because] poor nutrition creates most unhealthy bodies that must seek another outlet for its [sic] deranged systems.”
She also discloses her contempt for sex with the lights on, citing an ancient Hebrew text that advises, “no man enjoys his wife by either sunlight or lamplight.”
Dr. Cantrell overtly expresses her frustration with organized religion, blaming it for keeping the masses subservient to precepts that are in conflict with the traditions practiced by our antediluvian ancestors. She viewed religious dogmas as “the perfect way to get people to degenerate;” explaining that in our distant past, “when the primal instincts left, so entered the crutch of religion.”
The author also labels Jesus an “asexual” hippie, and decries the “hypnotic fascination of Christ whose long hair and robes were much frowned upon.” She later takes aim at the divinity of virgin births, classifying them as prime examples of an “androgynous” woman “fertilizing the egg herself.”
While she had a beef with modern eating habits, Cantrell wasn’t a fan of fasting. She saw depriving the body of nutrition as a tactic used by various religions to “strip minds from reality.” Her warning was clear: “The weaker the people, the easier they are fooled.”
Chances are, not all of her biological evidence would hold up in court. At one point, she emphatically states that, “it is a known fact that healthy women produce nothing but males.”
She later claims that the ancients had a “recipe for creating a feminine baby” which involved taking “certain herbs to combat the male hormones,” or mimicking animals that “create whatever gender they believe is needed” through orientation with the magnetic poles.
In a statement not evaluated by the CDC, Dr. Cantrell goes on to declare that “a truly healthy person gets no colds at all.”
Even with controversial positions on many social topics, we have a soft spot for Lana Cantrell. We may not agree with all of her conclusions, but we tip our cap to her conviction and follow-through. Writing the book as a dissertation for her PhD thesis, she pulled no punches for the academics controlling her fate, reminding them that “a ‘Dr.’ in front of one’s name is a long way from being a mark of perfection.”
Despite her prolific reworking of history, Dr. Cantrell is a recluse. She has virtually no online presence or paper trail. Her second and last book, a rebuke of the medical system, was published in 1998.
Dr. Cantrell’s second book was a personal tale centered around her father’s experience with the medical establishment.Upon reflection, perhaps a major reason The Greatest Story was hardly told was because of its limited availability. Copies of the tome are difficult to locate and routinely sell for $1,000 or more.
The ideas presented in her book have their shortcomings (she’s only human!), but Dr. Cantrell’s thorough interpretation of prehistory is quite unlike anything else in print—making it a worthy addition to the ‘ancient alien’ canon.
An ad for The Greatest Story Never Told that ran in UFO Review #29The Observer is a physical zine that covers topics of high strangeness.
