Photo: ISKCON News
The co-author of “Forbidden Archeology” and a disciple of Srila Prabhupada since the 1970s spent his last years and months, as he spent his career, arguing that the human story is older than science allows.
LOS ANGELES, United States — Drutakarma Dasa, the ISKCON author and researcher known to the wider world as Michael A. Cremo, passed away on 14 October 2026 at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Los Angeles, ISKCON News reported the same day. He was 78. According to the report, he died at 4:45 a.m. Pacific time after choosing to discontinue life support and, later, artificial nutrition; in his final days he took calls from godbrothers and well-wishers, and local devotees gathered at his bedside to chant.[1]
News of his condition had been circulating among devotees for more than a week. On 7 October, ISKCON Desire Tree reported that he had decided to discontinue the machines sustaining him.[2] On 11 October, Dandavats and ISKCON Desire Tree published a biographical profile under the heading “His Grace Drutakarma Prabhu has passed away”; the profile itself gives no date, place or circumstances of death.[3][4] ISKCON News, in its obituary of 14 October, gives the date of departure as 14 October, and that is the date carried by Wikipedia.[1][5] Readers who saw the earlier announcements should note the discrepancy.
He was born Michael A. Cremo on 15 July 1948 in Schenectady, New York.[5] The profile circulated on Dandavats says that his father served as a United States military intelligence officer, that he attended high school in Germany and travelled with his family across Europe, and that he entered the School of International Affairs at George Washington University in 1966, where he became interested in Eastern philosophy and the Vedas.[3] Wikipedia records his attendance at the university from 1966 to 1968.[5] One devotee quoted by ISKCON News, Gopal Hari Das, recalled that he never completed a college degree, which did not stop him from presenting papers at academic conferences for decades.[1]
He encountered Krishna consciousness in the early 1970s and joined ISKCON in Washington, D.C. — in 1974 according to ISKCON News, in 1973 according to the Dandavats profile.[1][3] He received initiation from Srila Prabhupada and the name Drutakarma Dasa, “servant of swift action”.[3] From 2002 he also served as an initiating spiritual master in ISKCON.[1]
In the 1980s he worked as a writer and editor for the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, where he contributed to several of the small books that introduced a generation of readers to the movement: Chant and Be Happy, The Higher Taste, Coming Back and Divine Nature.[1][3] The Dandavats profile dates his BBT service to 1980–1986 and adds that he served as a public-affairs consultant for ISKCON Communications.[3]
His best-known work is Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race (1993), written with the mathematician Richard L. Thompson (Sadaputa Dasa). The 900-page volume gathers reports of anomalous archaeological finds from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and argues that evidence for extreme human antiquity has been dismissed or excluded by mainstream science.[3] An abridged edition, The Hidden History of the Human Race, reached a wider readership.[1] He followed it with Forbidden Archeology’s Impact (1998), Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory (2003) and, in 2025, Extreme Human Antiquity.[1][3] The Dandavats profile states that his books have sold more than 300,000 copies and been translated into 26 languages.[3]
He described himself as a Vedic creationist and presented his research at meetings of the World Archaeological Congress and the European Association of Archaeologists; his paper on Puranic concepts of time appeared in the Routledge volume Time and Archaeology.[1][5] Mainstream archaeologists have generally rejected his conclusions, and Wikipedia classifies his work as pseudoarchaeology.[5]
Within the movement he served on the Sastric Advisory Committee from its inception and helped develop exhibits for the Temple of the Vedic Planetarium in Mayapur.[1] He was a research associate in the history and philosophy of science for the Bhaktivedanta Institute.[3] Bhakti Vijnana Swami recalled that at one point he had planned to take sannyasa, and had been granted permission, but changed his mind:[1]
“He renounced renunciation for the sake of preaching.”
Bhakti Vijnana Swami, quoted by ISKCON News, 14 October 2026[1]
ISKCON News collected remembrances from leaders and godbrothers.[1]
ISKCON News illustrated its obituary with photographs of him lecturing in Los Angeles, Brussels, Budapest, Oxford, Braj and Vrindavan between 1997 and 2018.[1]
Image: Akincana Gocara (AI-generated), from a photo of Srila Prabhupada published by Nandgram Dham GLOBAL…
An updated briefing note from the Mumbai side of the ISKCON Bengaluru dispute sets out…
A Facebook reel asks whether a clip of Bhakti Vikasa Swami and Basu Ghosh Das…
Image: Akincana Gocara (AI-generated) ONLINE — Mukunda Hari, a Sanskrit teacher, is opening an online…
A 2021 film by Karuna Productions follows Bhakti Charu Swami from a westernised Bengali home…
In a message published by ISKCON, the well-known speaker offers his respects to Srila Prabhupada…