That was the title of a fun lecture I attended this week at New York’s Explorers Club. The presenter, Ed Barnhart, is the president of The Maya Exploration Center.

In the course of pre-production on our film, 2012: Science or Superstition, it became clear that although we would be able to interview many of the most popular authors in the field, they were almost exclusively non-Mayan, Caucasian males (nothing wrong with that, of course, and the description fits me too). Nonetheless, conspicuously little was being said about the approaching “end-date” by the modern Maya themselves.

I contacted Ed Barnhart at the Maya Exploration Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to the study of ancient Maya civilization. Nominally based in Austin, Texas, the MEC spends a lot of time on the ground in southern Mexico and Central America. Ed told me that we could interview Alonso Mendez, an artist of Tzeltal Maya heritage, born in the highlands of Chiapas and raised in San Cristobal de Las Casas … if we could get ourselves to Palenque, Mexico during one of the worst periods of flooding in that part of Mexico in modern times.

Mendez has worked at the famous Palenque site as a project artist, a surveyor and an archaeologist. Despite the widespread flooding en route, Director Nimrod Erez and I eventually found Alonso in what is essentially a hippie community in the jungle surrounding the site and we definitely got the vibe that we weren’t the first gringo filmmakers to come through asking dumb questions about this 2012 thing. Fortunately, after a day or two he warmed up to us and perhaps our questions improved too. He gently but repeatedly made the point that so far as he could tell his ancestors were not focused on a galactic alignment that would take place centuries in the future.

I kept in touch with Ed but we weren’t able to interview him for the film. When I learned he was coming to New York I had to meet him! I took a photo with my iPhone but the room was dark and it looks terrible, so I won’t subject you to it. To set the scene instead, it was a $20 a head lecture, so the crowd was definitely older than usual for this kind of event, but the club looked like it was used to a lot of grey hair anyway. We easily got to drink and eat 20 bucks worth of pre-lecture food and wine, though, so the actual lecture was almost free

Ed spent about an hour giving what were essentially debunking answers to a list of 2012 fallacies. Mostly I agreed with him, and he certainly entertained his audience, but if John Major Jenkins was there he’d have engaged in a huge argument as to the relevance of the galactic alignment that JMJ focuses on in his work (see our film and book if you need a summary).

Bottom line: Ed’s the real deal. He’s spent more than 20 years exploring southern Mexico and central America, discovering and excavating Mayan ruins. He’s the brave academic who will talk openly about what 2012 means to him. If you want to visit any of the Maya sites I’d highly recommend going there with Ed and/or his colleagues at MEC.