Hancock is one of the foremost authorities on Ancient Mysteries, having written numerous bestselling non-fiction books on the subject such as Fingerprints Of The Gods, The Sign & The Seal, Heavens Mirror and Supernatural and, most recently, the fantasy adventure novel Entangled.

Turbowolf released their eponymous debut album in November 2011, a blend of dirty rock ‘n roll, punked-up riffs and psychedelic noise. The band are about to embark on a European tour starting February 23, 2012 in London. Their shared fascination with the esoteric and the mysterious led to this meeting of minds.

In this episode Graham & the band discuss his time in Ethiopia and the search for the Ark Of The Covenant, the evidence for a Lost Civilisation, Ancient Maps & an alternative chronology for many of the worlds Ancient Monuments.

The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone is a large boulder on the side of Hidden Mountain, near Los Lunas, New Mexico, about 35 miles south of Albuquerque, that bears a very regular inscription carved into a flat panel. The stone is also known as the Los Lunas Mystery Stone or Commandment Rock. The inscription is interpreted to be an abridged version of the Decalogue or Ten Commandments in a form of Paleo-Hebrew. A letter group resembling the tetragrammaton YHWH, or “Yahweh,” makes four appearances. The stone is controversial in that some claim the inscription is Pre-Columbian, and therefore proof of early Semitic contact with the Americas.

The first recorded mention of the stone is in 1933, when professor Frank Hibben, an archaeologist from the University of New Mexico, saw it. Hibben was led to the stone by an unnamed guide who claimed to have found it as a boy in the 1880s. The 1880s date of discovery is important to those who believe that the stone was inscribed by a lost tribe of Israel. The Paleo-Hebrew script is practically identical to the Phoenician script, which was known at the time, thus not precluding the possibility of fraud. One argument against the stone’s antiquity is its apparent use of modern Hebrew punctuation, though amateur epigrapher Barry Fell argued that the punctuation is consistent with antiquity. Other researchers dismiss the inscription based on the numerous stylistic and grammatical errors that appear in the inscription.

More: Wikipedia

The Temple of the Rose Cross, 1618.

[Site editor's note: This article below by Graham Hancock was first published in the newly available Disinformation title The Georgia Guidestones: America’s Most Mysterious Monument.]

Not all ancient monuments are mysterious and not all mysterious monuments are ancient.

The Georgia Guidestones are decidedly not ancient—until 1980 there was nothing on top of that bare hill outside of Elberton, Georgia—yet there is much that is extremely mysterious about them.

Raymond Wiley and KT Prime do a first-class job in this little book of telling what is known about the stones, and what is not, revealing and exploring their mysteries one by one. They always keeps their feet on the ground and avoid extravagant or fanciful explanations when a simpler one will do. This only makes it all the more mysterious, after the ground has been so thoroughly raked over, that we still to this day do not know the true identity of the man calling himself R. C. Christian who commissioned and paid for the monument!

What is unmissable, is the strong whiff of seventeenth century Rosicrucianism running through the whole story; indeed the Guidestones bear many of the hallmarks of a “Rosicrucian stunt” in the classic mold designed to shake things up, challenge old and entrenched positions, get people thinking along new lines.

One night in 1623, for example, dramatic placards were positioned on the walls of many public buildings in Paris and distributed along all the main streets of the city. They contained pronouncements from the “deputies of the principal College of the Brothers of the Rose Cross who show and teach without books or marks how to speak all languages of the countries where we wish to be and to draw men from error and death.” The placards also stated that the deputies were “making a visible and invisible stay in the city.” In other words they would be seen only by those who they wished to see them, while to others they would be invisible.

The placards caused a “hurricane” of rumor about the mysterious Rose Cross fraternity and its eponymous founder Christian Rosenkreutz. Various Rosicrucian documents, espousing radical and far-reaching ideas, had already begun to circulate and hundreds more were to appear, going on to play a key role in the Enlightenment. Bizarrely, however, it was always also understood that Rosicrucianism—and certainly its core notion of a secret brotherhood of sages and savants waiting in the wings to take over the guidance of society—was something of a hoax and that the so-called Rosicrucian Manifestoes were allegorical in nature.

All this seems to me to fit perfectly with the strange story of the Guidestones, starting of course with the elusive funder “R. C. Christian” (i.e., Christian Rosenkreutz), who claims to represent a group of Americans who believe in God (like the original members of the Rosy Cross Brotherhood), who is visible to some in the Elberton community but not to others, and who creates a monument inscribed in multiple languages “to convey certain ideas across time [and to] hasten in small ways the dawning of an age of reason.”

I suggest, however, that the ideas expressed in the stones’ inscriptions, like the ideas in the original Rosicrucian Manifestoes, are there first and foremost to get people worked up emotionally and engaged intellectually with issues they might otherwise pass over. Thus, for example, the statement on the Guidestones that we should “Maintain Humanity Under 500,000,000” does not have to be in any way “true,” or rooted in any great wisdom, or even something that “R. C. Christian” himself necessarily believed in, to fulfill the function of shaking up our thinking about global population and alerting us to the moral, ethical and other issues involved in enforced population control. Likewise the notion of a “world court” that appears on the Guidestones may be a piece of advocacy for such an institution, or it may again simply be intended to make us think.

To this extent the extreme reactions the monument has provoked, including the 2008 spray paint and polyepoxide attack, could be exactly what “R. C. Christian” and his shadowy group hoped for and intended when they conceived of and commissioned the Guidestones. To attack something in the realm of ideas one must first get to grips with it and try to understand it. As we do this, though it may be subtle at first, it can begin to shape and change us.

What better form of initiation is there than the one that leads us to initiate ourselves?

Graham Hancock is the author of Fingerprints of the Gods and Supernatural, and co-author, with Robert Bauval, of The Master Game.

According to British scientist Stephen Hawking, anyway. From Reuters:

The biggest mystery in the universe perplexing one of the world’s best known scientists is — women.

When New Scientist magazine asked “Brief History of Time” author Stephen Hawking what he thinks about most, the Cambridge University professor renowned for unraveling some of the most complex questions in modern physics answered: “Women. They are a complete mystery.”…

[continues at Reuters]

Scientists from Edinburgh Zoo have solved the riddle of a yeti finger taken from a Nepalese monastery half a century ago. The mummified remains have been held in the Royal College of Surgeons museum in London since the 1950s.

A DNA sample analysed by the zoo’s genetic expert Dr Rob Ogden has finally revealed the finger’s true origins — following DNA tests it has found to be human bone.

The yeti, also known as the Abominable Snowman, is a legendary giant ape-like creature said to inhabit the Himalayan region of Nepal and Tibet. Despite the lack of evidence of its existence, the yeti myth retains a strong appeal in both Nepal and the west, where it became popular in the 19th century.

The finger, which was said to be from a yeti, was taken from a Nepalese monastery by an American explorer in the 1950s. It was then smuggled out of India with the help of Hollywood actor James Stewart, who hid the artefact in his wife’s lingerie case.

Police continued a search for clues Wednesday in a mystery that began Tuesday morning when Canadian tourists found a severed human leg behind a waterfront home. The leg washed ashore near the Bay Vista Recreation Center. Police believe it was in the water for a day or two. They believe it was a right leg that may have belonged to an overweight white female who was dismembered.

Two marine units on Wednesday searched waters from Tierra Verde to the Tropical Shores area, said St. Petersburg police spokesman Mike Puetz. Officers did not find any other body parts, he said.

Puetz also said police investigated a tip Wednesday from a person who reported seeing an item that resembled a foot floating off St. Pete Beach.

A large metallic ball fell out of the sky on a remote grassland in Namibia, prompting baffled authorities to contact NASA and the European space agency.

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.

Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.

With a diameter of 35 centimetres (14 inches), the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of “two halves welded together”.

It was made of a “metal alloy known to man” and weighed six kilogrammes (13 pounds), said Ludik…

[continues at AFP via Yahoo News]

COWLEY COUNTY, Kansas — Residents in Cowley County are still talking about a mystery craft, seen being towed down US 77 Monday.

Sitting inside Lindly’s Appliance Store, Kammi Root is used to seeing large machinery towed down US 77. But what she saw Monday afternoon is something she won’t soon forget. “There was this funny sphere that went through on this big trailer and my first thought was, ‘That looks like a UFO,’” said Root.

In the western lowlands of Nicaragua, in a region of vast sugarcane fields, sits the tiny community of La Isla.The small houses are a patchwork of concrete and wood. Pieces of cloth serve as doors.

Maudiel Martinez emerges from his house to greet me. He’s pale, and his cheekbones protrude from his face. He hunches over like an old man — but he is only 19-years-old.

“The way this sickness is — you see me now, but in a month I could be gone. It can take you down all of a sudden,” he says. Maudiel’s kidneys are failing. They do not perform the essential function of filtering waste from his body. He’s being poisoned from the inside. When he got ill two years ago, he was already familiar with this disease and how it might end. “I thought about my father and grandfather,” he says. Both died of the same condition. Three of his brothers have it too.

All of them worked in the sugarcane fields.

Read more here.

The Georgia Guidestones are a collection of standing stones near Elberton, Georgia. Built in 1980, they are primarily composed of six slabs of granite: one central pillar, four “major” stones that fan out from the center, and a capstone. The capstone has engravings on all four of its sides in four different ancient languages, all of which read, “Let these be guidestones to an Age of Reason,” when translated. The major stones are each engraved on both sides, and each side contains text in one of eight modern languages asserting ten guidelines.

These guidelines have proven extremely controversial, causing speculation and rumors of conspiracy that go far beyond northeast Georgia.

The Georgia Guidestones are at once a Rosetta Stone, an astronomical observatory, and a road map for rebuilding civilization. Theories of conspiracy, occultism, and apocalypse surround this monument, and it has been called a “prism of meaning” by many who have studied it. At the heart of this confusion is the missing piece of the puzzle: who was the mystery man that designed and funded the project?

Conspiracy theorists surmise a global plot on the part of shadowy group of men to reduce and subjugate the world’s population and create a “New World Order.” Others believe that the man behind the monument was a Rosicrucian, and that the stones are representative of that group’s occult manifestos. Are the stones proof of a Satanic conspiracy or a testament to a Cold War psychology of nuclear annihilation?

Local historian and Georgia native Raymond Wiley was interviewed for The History Channel’s Brad Meltzer’s Decoded about the Guidestones and is a principal expert for a feature-length documentary currently in production. With local writer K.T. Prime he has written the definitive account of America’s most famous megalithic monument.

Behold a giant-headed alien mummy that turned up in Peru. Stare into the all-knowing eye sockets of an alien that somehow wound up on Earth many years ago, and was mummified by the locals. But what was is it doing here?

Website RPP is claiming that Renato Davila Riquelme, an anthropologist working at the Privado Ritos Andinos museum in Cusco, has discovered remains of something that isn’t human. Measuring at 20 inches tall, the tiny remains were originally believed to be that of a child, but Spanish and Russian doctors disagree, saying:

“It has a non-human appearance because the head is triangular and big, almost the same size as the body. At first we believed it to be a child’s body until Spanish and Russian doctors came and confirmed that, yes, it’s an extraterrestrial being.”

A Google Maps satellite has spotted a series of bizarre structures during a sweep of the Gobi desert in China.

The internet is buzzing with theories about what their purpose is, with suggestions ranging from giant QR readers to practise targets for military satellites.

To add to the intrigue, they are located on the borders of Gansu province and Xinjiang in northwestern China – an area that the superpower uses to build military, space and nuclear equipment.

In fact, some of the sites are less than 100 miles from Jiuquan, where China’s space programme headquarters and launch pads can be found.

Some internet users have been trying to overlay one of the strange structures on to various U.S. city maps, worried that there may be a sinister military purpose behind them.

Others have pointed out that if China wanted to attack a U.S. city, it doesn’t need a practise map in the desert.

However, upon zooming in, planes and burnt-out trucks can be seen on some of the photographs, which hints that they may indeed be targets of some kind…

[continues in the Daily Mail]

It was found among possessions belonging to Welsh surgeon Sir John Williams, a chief suspect in the Victorian murders. Sir John, known to his family at the time of the killings as “Uncle Jack” was the surgeon to Queen Victoria who lived in London at the time of the slayings.

He fled the capital after the murders and later founded the National Library for Wales in Aberystwyth. One of his distant relatives has now unearthed the old black-handled surgeon’s knife, which he used for operations, and believes it could be the murder weapon.

Tony Williams, 49, Sir John’s great-great-great-great nephew, has now published a book, which features the startling image of the knife, to expose his relative’s guilt.

Read More: Telegraph

A larger-than-life Lego man bearing the cryptic phrase “no real than you are” has washed ashore on the Florida coast. Beachcombers in Siesta Key found the roughly 8-foot-tall Lego man just before dawn Tuesday. The figure had “Ego Leonard” and the number 8 on its back.

In 2007, an almost-identical creation was found in the Netherlands. Another turned up in England the next year.

The artifact pictured left is a pamphlet dated August 22, 1678, entitled The Mowing-Devil: Or Strange NEWS out of Hertford-shire. It takes the form of a primitive news report, which started life as a woodcut — a type of early printing plate created by carving into a wooden block and then inking it.

The image depicts a demon, scythe in hand, felling crop stems in what seems like a systematic fashion.

He began gathering herbs in the mountain ranges at the age of ten, and also began learning of longevity methods, surviving on a diet of herbs and rice wine. He lived this way for the first 100 years of his life. In 1749, when he was 71 years old, he moved to Kai Xian to join the Chinese army as a teacher of the martial arts and as a tactical advisor.

One of his disciples, the Taiji Quan Master Da Liu told of Master Li’s story: at 130 years old Master Li encountered an older hermit, over 500 years old, in the mountains who taught him Baguazhang and a set of Qigong with breathing instructions, movements training coordinated with specific sounds, and dietary recommendations. Da Liu reports that his master said that his longevity “is due to the fact that I performed the exercises every day — regularly, correctly, and with sincerity — for 120 years.”

In 1927, Li Ching Yuen was invited by General Yang Sen to visit him in Wan Xian, Szechuan. The general was fascinated by his youthfulness, strength and prowess in spite of his advanced age. His famous portrait was photographed there. Returning home, he died a year later, some say of natural causes; others claim that he told friends that “I have done all I have to do in this world. I will now go home.”

After Li’s death, General Yang Sen investigated the truth about his claimed background and age. He wrote a report that was later published. In 1933, people interviewed from his home province remembered seeing him when they were children, and that he hadn’t aged much during their lifetime. Others reported that he had been friends with their grandfathers.

I have studied Taoist immortal techniques and spent many years dabbling with Baguazhang and Xingyiquan, so I am not unfamiliar with the myths surrounding such “ancient sages,” but most of the other reports I had read were either clearly falsified or were intentionally vague, saying things like “he looked like a man of seventy though he lived for centuries.” But this one is a bit of a head-scratcher. It is true that extreme claims call for extreme evidence, and this is probably in one way or another faked. But can we prove it?

More on Modern Mythology

In the opening lines of his 1978 publication, Diableries: La Vie Quotidienne Chez Satan, Jac Remise relates how a crew of demolition workers in Paris discovered a mysterious wooden box hidden in the ruins of a condemned building. The box, which had been wrapped with old military belts, was found to contain a collection of photographs depicting a hedonistic world filled with drunken devils, sinister skeletons and scantily clad women. An anonymous note found buried among the glass images added:

“This is the work of my life, it is thus that I dreamed of Hell. If my visions are true, then the wicked may rest assured, the afterlife will be sweet for them to bear.”

What the demolition workers discovered that day was a series of photographs known as Les Diableries, The Diabolical. Each scene in the series was composed of an elaborate diorama sculpted out of plaster and clay and embellished with miniature props. Created in Paris during the 1860s, the series was printed in the form of stereoscopic transparencies which, when viewed with special lenses, produced a mesmerizing 3D effect.

For the eleventh time in four years, a human foot washed ashore near Vancouver – baffling investigators who are at a loss to explain the grisly trend.

The foot, which was inside a running shoe, turned up along the British Columbia coast late Tuesday, according to police. It spotted by a passerby near the Vancouver’s False Creek.

Police have no theories as to how the foot ended up in the water – but have not suggested that foul play is suspected. Since 2007, nearly a dozen feet encased in shoes have appeared on beaches in the area, including a few over the border in Washington state. The bizarre discoveries have attracted international attention – and spawned fears of a serial killer.

But cops have steadfastly denied that anything sinister is behind the gruesome discoveries, suggesting that the deaths were drownings or suicides and that the decaying feet separated from corpses naturally in the water.

Most of the remains are still unidentified, though police said at least three of the feet have been matched with British Columbia men who were reported missing.

Another mass fainting incident struck a garment factory yesterday, this time in the provincial capital of Kampong Chhnang where more than 100 workers at M&V factory collapsed, company and union representatives said yesterday. Staff began falling to the factory floor at about 9:00am. A factory supplying sportswear giant Puma was hit by fainting twice this year: at the end of last month and in April.

“We don’t know why they fainted.” Company representative Un Chhan Teak said there was no connection between the mass fainting and working conditions, and that the fainting was a result of shock. After one or two women collapsed, the others panicked and followed suit, he explained.

Union leaders have said garment workers are cutting back on food and working longer hours to make ends meet. Garment workers earn US$61 a month for 48 hours a week of work at factories that have licences to export.

Kampong Chhnang Provincial Hospital director Sou Rin Ravuthy said doctors believed the women fainted from a variety of factors: fatigue, insufficient food and shock from seeing colleagues drop unconscious.

There are more than 700 curious tunnel networks in Bavaria, but their purpose remains a mystery. Were they built as graves for the souls of the dead, as ritual spaces or as hideaways from marauding bandits?

At least 700 of these chambers have been found in Bavaria alone, along with about 500 in Austria. In the local vernacular, they have fanciful names such as “Schrazelloch” (”goblin hole”) or “Alraunenhöhle” (”mandrake cave”). They were supposedly built by elves, and legend has it that gnomes lived inside. According to some sagas, they were parts of long escape tunnels from castles. Similar small underground labyrinths have been found across Europe, from Hungary to Spain, but no one knows why they were built.

The tunnel entrances are sometimes located in the kitchens of old farmhouses, near churches and cemeteries or in the middle of a forest. The atmosphere inside is dark and oppressive, much as it would be inside an animal den.

There is not a single written record of the construction of an Erdstall dating from the medieval period. “The tunnels were completely hushed up,” says Ahlborn.

Archeologists have also been surprised to find that the tunnels are almost completely empty and appear to be swept clean, as if they were abodes for the spirits. One gallery contained an iron plowshare, while heavy millstones were found in three others. Virtually nothing else has turned up in the vaults.

Until recently, the secret caves were explored only by amateur archeologists. The pioneer of Erdstall exploration, Lambert Karner (1841 to 1909), was a priest. According to his records, he crawled through 400 vaults, lit only by flickering candlelight, with “strange winding passages” through which “one can often only force oneself like a worm.”

But how old is the vault? A few radiocarbon dating analyses have also been performed, and they indicate that the galleries date back to the 10th to the 13th century. Bits of charcoal recovered from the Erdstall tunnels in Höcherlmühle date back to the period between 950 and 1050 A.D.

Swedish sea treasure hunters have found something extraordinary: A 60-foot disc sunk in the bottom of the ocean, with what appears to be 985-foot-long impact tracks leading to it.

An engaged couple in Anderson County says a shadowy image that turned up on a receipt from Walmart looks like the face of Jesus.

Jacob Simmons and his fiancee, Gentry Lee Sutherland, said they bought some pictures from Walmart on June 12. The following Wednesday, the couple had just come home from a church service when Simmons spotted the receipt on the floor of Sutherland’s apartment. He says the receipt had changed. “I was leaving the kitchen and I just looked on the floor, and it was like it was looking at me,” Simmons said.

A dark gray mark on the receipt seems to show two eyes, a nose and a mouth in a thickly bearded face. “Then the more you look at it, the more it looked like Jesus, and it was just shocking, breathtaking,” Simmons said.

The couple said the image seemed to answer a question they had just been asked at church. “We had a message on knowing God, abiding in him,” Sutherland said. “(The preacher asked) ‘If you know God, would you recognize him if you saw him?’”

“We just feel like it’s a blessing that God showed it to us and opened our eyes. And we just feel like we should share the blessing God gave to us to everybody else,” Sutherland said.

A giant 55 foot ’sea monster’ has been found washed up on a beach in China. The beast from the deep is so badly decayed it cannot be identified. But according to local reports from Guangdong, in the south-east of the country, it weighed at least 4.5 tons.

People have flocked to see the creature — despite the rotting corpse’s foul stench. It was found tangled in ropes and one theory is fisherman caught it but could not land it as it was so big.

What is this thing? A monster? The strangest mutant dog ever? Be forewarned that the additional photos and video are not for the squeamish. Inexplicata writes:

Local residents encountered a strange creature, small and walking on all fours before standing on two legs. They described the creature as having thin arms, legs and torso, covered with very little hair. Unfortunately, the few witnesses to this event were gripped by fear, and threw themselves against the unknown entity, lopping off its head with a single blow and throwing its small carcass to the local dogs, which devoured it almost immediately. It should also be noted that Chiquimitío is a farming community, and it is customary for residents to carry machetes wherever they go.

Subsequently, the same people involved in the event took what remains, up to this moment, the only evidence of the case: one cell phone video with a duration of 1 minute and 11 seconds, showing the head propped up against what appear to be wooden boards.

This being’s head shows signs of having been alive for a longer time, a detail evident in the teeth, which were in some way developed. In turn, the strange shape and size of the ears is striking. These could initially be said to resemble those of a Chihuahua dog. However, this species of canine has rigid and firm ears, contrary to what we see in this unknown creature, as the ears appear larger and more flexible.

Now a tiny English village is the latest community to claim to be being hit by the phenomenon known as “the hum.”

Residents of Woodland, in County Durham, claim that every night a noise permeates the air similar to the throb of a car engine. It is sometimes so strong that it even shakes the bed of one of the householders. But no matter how hard they look, the community cannot find the source of the problem and, at their wits end, have called in the council to investigate.

The 300-strong population is the latest around the world to be hit by the rumble which has in the past led to wild conspiracy theories blaming it on UFOs, government experiments and abandoned mine shafts. Its most famous occurrence was in Bristol in the 1970s when more than a thousand people complained of the consistent drone causing nosebleeds, sleeplessness and headaches. It vanished as mysteriously as it arrived and was never explained.

Residents claim their version of “the hum” is constant from midnight until 4am every night and stops them sleeping. The noise started about two months ago and has been plaguing the isolated village every day since.

Marylin Grech, 57, a retired store detective, said: “In certain areas of the house you can hear it more loudly. It is definitely from outside, it’s in the air, all around, very faint…It vibrates through the house. We’ve turned all the electricity off in the house and we can still hear it, so it’s not that.”

Do you hold the key to solving some gadget mysteries from the last century of U.S. science and technology? Visitors to the site can view the items and offer clues about the history and origins of some of these important artifacts.

A pilot from New Zealand is in Nepal to return a replica of what some believe is the hand of a yeti to a remote monastery in the Everest region. Mike Allsop will fly from Kathmandu to Pangboche Monastery, which sits at 13,123ft.

The originals were stolen from the monastery in the 1990s. They first came to light in the 1950s when an expedition to find the mythical yeti came upon the monastery. Peter Byrne, the leader of the 1950s expedition to find the abominable snowman, said that the hand did not match the skeleton of a human or a primate.

Mr Byrne managed to take one of the bones from the hand out of Nepal to his friend, the Hollywood actor James Stewart, who was on holiday at the time with his wife in Calcutta. James Stewart’s wife then placed the bone in her lingerie box and smuggled it into England where it was examined by a professor at Oxford University who said he could not conclusively say what kind of bone it was.

Composite sketch of the suspect in the Christopher Wallace shooting.

View the documents in the FBI’s Vault, a new website for records never before released to the public. Via CNN:

The 1997 murder of Christopher Wallace, the rapper also known as The Notorious B.I.G. and Biggie Smalls, remains an unsolved crime despite Los Angeles police and FBI investigations that lasted for years.

The FBI, which joined the case five years after the shooting, opened up its files this week by publishing hundreds of pages of investigation reports and notes from its probe on the agencies website.

Readers get a behind-the-scenes look at the FBI and LAPD’s work, but the documents are heavily redacted, hiding the names of sources, investigators and suspects.

The drive-by shooting, in front of dozens of witnesses who were leaving a music industry party in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997, spurred several conspiracy theories, but no arrests.

Smalls, 24, was killed six months after his former friend and rap rival Tupac Shakur was gunned down on a Las Vegas street, causing suspicion that both shootings were part of an “East Coast versus West Coast” hip hop war. Shakur recorded for Marion “Suge” Knight’s Los Angeles-based Death Row Records, while Smalls was signed with New York-based Bad Boy Entertainment, founded by Sean “Puffy” Combs.

The FBI opened its case in December 2002 because of “multiple source information” that Smalls was killed “in retaliation for the murder of Tupac Shakur” and that a rogue LAPD officer was involved, an FBI report said. The FBI’s case was closed in January 2005 when the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles decided there was enough evidence for indictments in the case, according to one letter in the files.

For more information, see the FBI documents here or see original CNN article.