A Prehistoric Global "Tamana" Culture? Plus: The "Glamour" Writer Who Hates Horror Movies10/16/2016 PZ Myers is (humorously) “blaming” me for introducing him via Twitter this past week to the angry pseudohistory of the white supremacists who believe that a lost white race of Solutreans were destroyed by Native Americans in a “white genocide” in North America at the end of the last Ice Age. It doesn’t get much more disgusting than that, but I’ve learned that there is always a claim that is worse.
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Greek Sculptors in Ancient China? Plus: A Very Early Claim for a Pole Shift Destroying Atlantis10/15/2016 This week the BBC announced that it would screen a new documentary next week that will allege that the famous terra cotta warriors found in the tomb of China’s first emperor were the work of ancient Greek artisans who traveled to China in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. Alexander’s armies reached as far as India before his death in 323 BCE, and a Hellenistic Greek-Indian kingdom existed in what is now Afghanistan down to perhaps as late as the first century CE. The terra cotta warriors were sculpted in the years leading up to Qin Shi Huang’s death in 206 BCE. Yesterday Donald Trump delivered a fiery speech in which he blamed his current scandals on a “dark conspiracy” fomented by “international banks” working in conjunction with “elites” in order to undermine the will of the American people. Given that Trump is tied to New World Order conspiracy theorist Steve Bannon, his campaign CEO, and Info Wars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, it seems quite probably that these “international banks” are a reference to the international bankers routinely blamed for attempting to create a one-world genocidal government in conspiracy literature. These bankers are typically described as identical with or stooges for space aliens, Reptilians, Freemasons, and above all, Jews. Indeed, among the so-called “alt-right,” white nationalists seized on this phrase and began posting online conspiracy theories about how the Jews are behind Trump’s scandals. Today I have two topics to discuss: John Podesta’s Nibiru email and Syfy’s new horror series Channel Zero. Yesterday I discussed the connection between Nephilim theories and the Trump campaign, so today, in the interest of balance, I’d like to share one of the further revelations from the Wikileaks publication of Clinton advisor John Podesta’s emails, which U.S. officials concluded had been hacked on orders from the Russian government. Fringe websites have gone into a tizzy after discovering that one of the emails Podesta received discussed Zecharia Sitchin, Nibiru, and ancient astronauts. This was not, however, an email sent by high ranking U.S. officials but instead was an email from a member of the public sent to several different officials, no different than the tens of thousands of crank letters that fill government archives. Whenever I mention politics in one of my blog posts, I receive angry messages from people complaining that it is inappropriate to do so. However, it has been clear for, frankly, centuries that fringe history and conspiracy theories have a political dimension. Over the last few days it’s become obvious that this year is no different, and in many ways more extreme than we have seen in decades, and not just because the former Curse of Oak Island guest who current runs Xplrr Media spent most of the past weekend trying to goad Republican politicians into retweeting a badly designed anti-Hillary Clinton meme. Remember the myth of the lost white race of Mound Builders? It’s currently en vogue thanks the resurgence of white supremacist and white nationalist thinking among racists emboldened by the coarsening public discourse encouraged by the Trump campaign. Never one to miss a cultural moment, on Columbus Day here in America—a day Native Americans protest as honoring the destruction of their culture—Graham Hancock announced on his blog yesterday that he plans to overcome the relatively disappointing sales of last year’s Magicians of the Gods by exploring whether North America’s Native American mounds were actually the work of his lost ancient civilization, the one that he identified in both Magicians and its predecessor, Fingerprints of the Gods, as “white.” As the Trump campaign reeled from the videotape of Trump appearing to brag about being able to commit sexual assault without consequence, Wikileaks attempted to staunch the bleeding by releasing emails from Clinton advisor John Podesta, which U.S. officials believe were hacked on orders from the Russian government as part of an effort to influence the American election. Included in those emails (whose authenticity is likely but not yet confirmed as of this writing) is one from last year in which onetime Apollo astronaut and Ancient Aliens pundit Edgar Mitchell warned Podesta, a UFO enthusiast, about what the space aliens, or Extraterrestrial Intelligences, as he called them, plan to do: Erich von Däniken has always been an opportunist. When authors across Europe and North America started writing about prehistoric UFO sightings in the 1950s and 1960s, he repackaged their work as Chariots of the Gods. When Christian conservatism came into flower in the years around 1980, he proposed to prove religion true with Miracles of the Gods. When “alternative archaeologists” like Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock revived Atlantis and pyramid mysteries in the 1990s, EVD latched on with The Eyes of the Sphinx. Last year, EVD caught the odor of Freemason conspiracy wafting up from the corpse of America Unearthed and the rantings of writers like Jim Marrs, and he produced The End of the Silence, a book I wasn’t aware of until this week but which (falsely) suggests in its book description and opening lines that it will reveal the unknown truths of the world’s secret societies, the organizations that run the world on behalf of space aliens. From the book description: Alternative Historians Unite to Claim Wadi-al-Jarf Papyri Do Not Prove Khufu Built the Great Pyramid10/8/2016 Last week, marijuana enthusiast Preston Peet, formerly of High Times magazine and the editor of the Disinformation Guide to Ancient Aliens, etc., published an article on Graham Hancock’s website attempting to discredit the recent announcement that a cache of texts found in Egypt documented construction work on the Great Pyramid during the reign of Khufu. Peet sits in an uncomfortable position where he wishes to discredit archaeological evidence in favor of medieval Arabic pyramid myths—but only the portions of which that support Graham Hancock’s lost civilization hypothesis. I am constantly amazed at the way Zecharia Sitchin’s ideas have so seeped into fringe culture that they appear in unexpected places. Today’s case in point is this bizarre rendering of a legend associated with Mt. Shasta in California from Dustin Naef, the author of two forthcoming books about the mountain and a one-time guest on a Travel Channel “mysteries” show. Here is how Naef presents the story in a recent Ancient Origins piece: |
About MeI'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. NewsletterEnter your email below to subscribe to my newsletter, The Skeptical Xenoarchaeologist, for updates on my latest projects, blog posts, and activities.
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