What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?

One of the credited experts is Ramtha. Ramtha is an alleged entity who is channelled by J.Z. Knight who appears in the film and whose organisation helped fund this film. Ramtha is said to be over 35,000 years old and originated in the sunken continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, where he was in charge of an army of over a million people.

When this movie was released, both film critics and scientists noted that it was not entirely up front about the role that the Ramtha School of Enlightenment (RSE)--a New Age spiritual sect often characterized as a cult--played in its precepts, development, and production. Though J. Z. Knight appears early and often as an interviewed expert in the movie, it is not until the end that she is identified as the founder of RSE, and her most controversial aspects (among which are her claim to be able to "channel" a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit named Ramtha) are not included at all. Many sources (for example, John Gorenfeld's September 2004 Salon article and Alison Willmore's October 2020 New York magazine article) state that this movie's three directors, William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente, were at the time also followers of Knight and RSE. Mark Vicente later became involved with another prominent cult: NXIVM, the human-potential-development and sex-trafficking pyramid scheme founded by convicted con artist Keith Raniere. After leaving NXIVM, Vicente participated in the exposé documentary series The Vow, revealing many of the cult's damaging tactics; however, nowhere in The Vow does Vicente admit that NXIVM was not his first time adhering to a cult-like group.

John Gorenfeld wrote in a September 2004 Salon article that David Albert, one of the interviewed experts in the film, feels he was duped and misrepresented as to the real purpose and agenda of the movie. "Albert, a professor at the Columbia University physics department, has accused the filmmakers of warping his ideas to fit a spiritual agenda. 'I don't think it's quite right to say I was "tricked" into appearing,' he said in a statement reposted by a critic on What the Bleep's Internet forum, 'but it is certainly the case that I was edited in such a way as to completely suppress my actual views about the matters the movie discusses. I am, indeed, profoundly unsympathetic to attempts at linking quantum mechanics with consciousness. Moreover, I explained all that, at great length, on camera, to the producers of the film ... Had I known that I would have been so radically misrepresented in the movie, I would certainly not have agreed to be filmed. I certainly do not subscribe to the 'Ramtha School on Enlightenment," whatever that is!' he finished. Albert provided Salon with an excerpt from a piece he's writing on the subject, in which he says, in part, 'I'm unwittingly made to sound as if (maybe) I endorse its thesis.' When told of Albert's complaints, [Meyer Gottlieb, president of the movie's distributor, Samuel Goldwyn Films] said, 'I certainly don't see it,' but acknowledged he's 'not into the science 100 percent.'"

In this movie, one interviewee repeats an untrue urban legend claiming that native people in the Caribbean were unable to see Columbus's ships because they had no prior context through which to discern such "advanced technology." Not only is this iteration of the story completely false, but this story was also false when it was first applied to interactions between other native peoples and later Western explorers like Magellan or Captain Cook.