Randall Carlson is an independent researcher, lecturer and podcaster who describes himself as a master builder and architectural designer. He argues that cosmic impacts and floods at the end of the last Ice Age reshaped the planet and erased the record of earlier advanced cultures, a case he makes on his Kosmographia podcast and in repeated appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience. His tie to the UFO subject is indirect: hosts who discuss non-human intelligence often invoke his framework of catastrophe and forgotten history.

His best-known argument concerns the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington. Source One News reported in 2023 that in Graham Hancock's Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, Carlson, whom the paper called an amateur geologist and writer, argued that the landscape was carved by a catastrophic flood lasting only weeks around 10,800 B.C., at the onset of the Younger Dryas cold period, with the water released from ice sheets by comet debris impacts. The U.S. Geological Survey, by the paper's account, dates the region's great floods to 18,000 to 20,000 years ago.

The partnership with Graham Hancock predates the series. In his 2015 book Magicians of the Gods, Hancock thanked Carlson for "his deep insights into catastrophist geology" and described an extensive field trip they made across North America in September and October 2014. The two have since appeared together on Rogan's podcast, and the descriptions of his own episodes bill him as a scholar and teacher whose podcast studies past global catastrophes and signs of advanced knowledge in ancient cultures.

That framework rests on the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, the proposal that a comet impact or airburst about 12,900 years ago triggered the abrupt cold interval. Most relevant experts reject the hypothesis for lack of clear evidence of an impact and favor explanations such as a surge of glacial meltwater into the Atlantic or volcanism. Its public reach has come largely through documentaries and Hancock's books, and Carlson is among the voices who carry it to podcast audiences.

His name enters UFO conversation mostly through Rogan. In a clip shared in March 2026, Rogan, discussing the Book of Enoch and its account of the Watchers, said, "I'm in the Randall Carlson, Graham Hancock school. I don't think this is our first go-around." In July 2026 Carlson appeared on American Alchemy, Jesse Michels's channel on UFOs and fringe science, in an episode titled "There's An Ancient Lunar Observatory in Colorado!" His account of a lost Ice Age world gives such shows a deep-time setting for their speculation about visitors and vanished technologies, which is why his name keeps surfacing in UAP media.