When scientist and author Gregg Braden joined The Joe Rogan Experience, he told Rogan that evidence exists of a 50,000-year-old human civilization that once lived on the Moon. Braden said both the United States and Russia discovered this evidence during the Cold War and entered into an agreement to keep it secret. He claimed that the discovery reveals a forgotten era of advanced human history that ended in destruction long before recorded civilization began.

Braden said his theory is not about aliens. He told Rogan that the Moon’s mysterious formations are the work of ancient humans who achieved great technological heights before annihilating themselves. “The evidence suggests they’re from us, from a time in our past, a cycle of civilization where we did great and beautiful things by working together until we destroyed one another through war,” he said. “And that we’re repeating that cycle again.” He described the evidence as a warning about humanity’s own recurring pattern of rise and collapse.

He said Darwin’s model of evolution fails to explain how modern humans appeared so suddenly in the fossil record. Braden pointed to Human Chromosome 2, which he calls the “smoking gun.” He claimed that this chromosome shows signs of a telomere-to-telomere fusion of two preexisting chromosomes that “does not happen in nature,” linking it to the emergence of modern humans roughly 200,000 years ago. From that fusion, he believes, a distinct human lineage emerged — one capable of technological mastery and possibly even lunar exploration.