In his monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen recounts a childhood encounter with three strangers named Frank who claimed to have lived in his family's home decades before. The youngest showed Cohen a hidden brick carving: “Bobby Frank, 1972.” This personal revelation leads Cohen to reflect on humanity’s ignorance of its own deep past: we awaken to life unaware of what came before, not from lack of curiosity but from unaware ignorance. He argues that a conspiracy can be a truth hidden from us, even the answer to a question we have not yet asked.

Modern humans have existed roughly 200,000 years, while life on Earth spans 3.5 billion years, leaving 3,495,888,000 pre-human years unaccounted for—ample time for several industrial civilizations to rise and fall. The Silurian Hypothesis, proposed in 2018 by climate modeler Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute and astrophysicist Adam Frank of the University of Rochester, suggests that any such civilization would leave only fleeting geological traces, such as a rapid carbon spike. They point to the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago, when global temperatures jumped from 9 to 14 °F, as a possible signature of an ancient industrial epoch.

The hypothesis draws inspiration from a *Doctor Who* episode featuring the Silurians, reptilian beings who achieved technological mastery 450 million years before humans. Cohen notes that ancient myths, biblical Nephilim, and Kabbalistic hints also point to earlier advanced species. Speculative claims of ancient nuclear wars in India, citing the Mahabharata and modern websites like Vedic Knowledge, further fuel the idea that we may not be the planet’s first technological species, leaving us to confront the humbling possibility that our own story is just one layer in a deep, recycled history.