Yesterday marked the twentieth anniversary of the WB/UPN series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), but due to my review of Sekret Machines I wasn’t able to mark the occasion. Because the show was a seminal part of my adolescent years, I feel like I should have more to say about than I do, but somehow I find that the barrage of media coverage has approached the anniversary from every possible angle. Instead, I’ll just talk a little bit about the show. I need a bit of a break anyway after devoting so many hours this past week to Peter Levenda’s pretentious drivel.
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Today I will conclude my review of Tom DeLonge’s and Peter Levenda’s new ancient astronaut book Sekret Machines: Gods, which has proven to be a rehash of standard ancient astronaut material with a good deal of Graham Hancock’s fantastical universe of altered consciousness and lost civilizations thrown into the mix thanks to Levenda’s admitted fascination with Hancock’s ideas. This all culminates in the book’s full-throated descent into a paean for religious belief and spirituality to counter the supposed horrors of science, secularism, and materialism. It’s depressing how frequently ancient astronaut claims turn into religion by proxy.
Yesterday I began my review of Tom DeLonge’s and Peter Levenda’s Sekret Machines: Gods, and it bears noting that the misspelling in the title is intentional. The authors explain that they chose the spelling to recall simultaneously a punk rock aesthetic, the German meaning of sekret, Soviet secrets, and Greek mysticism. The word, for Levenda, is important as the German word for a secretion, or an oozing, which summarizes how the authors think UFO information will leak out. But more importantly, Levenda wants us to remember that the Greek word for secret is mystikó, related to mysticism. It is religion that is Levenda’s primary interest, and spirituality eclipses UFOs in this volume.
Yesterday, ex-Blink-182 member and current ufology-award winner Tom DeLonge released his new ancient astronaut book Sekret Machines: Gods, the first in a nonfiction trilogy covering what DeLonge believes to be the true history of space aliens’ involvement with earthlings. In a previous post, I explained some of my philosophical problems with the approach that DeLonge’s coauthor, Peter Levenda, took in developing the book, as well as my concern that Levenda is either duplicitous or wholly ignorant in claiming that his approach to the ancient astronaut theory is wholly new and unprecedented. In a nutshell, my criticism is that Levenda frames the early history of aliens on Earth as the story of a cargo cult, something he wrongly believes is unique to him. The claim was first made in the film version of Chariots of the Gods, broadcast in the United States as In Search of Ancient Astronauts in 1973, and it has been a common trope among ancient astronaut theorists since then.
Yesterday I discussed Xaviant Hazes’s podcast appearance in which the DJ, Trump supporter, and bush-league conspiracy theorist described a project he says he is working on for the History Channel. He claimed that he is hunting for a cave containing the monstrous remains of giants, a cave first discovered by a German missionary named Bernard Middendorf, whom standard accounts say came to New Spain in 1756 and began a mission to convert the Natives. I had never heard of him having found a cave of giants, so this took a little digging to learn more about. The story is strange, and apparently obscure.
I’m sure many of you have probably listened to the Canadian paranormal podcast Grimerica. This week, the hosts interviewed Xaviant Haze, a DJ and researcher of the “pre-diluvian” world who has produced books about ancient giants, space aliens, “international bankers,” and other conspiracies. He takes influence from Theosophy (especially the fictitious Brotherhood of the Serpent) and is blithely unaware (or purposely ignores) the darker turn historic attempts at blaming global catastrophes on “international bankers” have taken, e.g., in his Suppressed History of American Banking (2016), he blamed the Civil War on the Rothschilds, a claim found among anti-Semites. His newest book is The Donald Trump Conspiracy, a book that alleges that Trump stands in opposition to an evil New World Order. Haze claims that his publisher offered him “a lot of money” to write an anti-Trump book, but when he turned in a pro-Trump screed, the publisher refused to accept it and he self-published the volume. It’s good to know that publishers pay “a lot of money” to crappy researchers who have nothing original to say.
For years now, Christian extremist L. A. Marzulli has hunted Nephilim giants under the banner of his Watchers DVD series. However, Marzulli is increasingly feeling the pressure from his competitors over at Ancient Aliens, and as a result, this week he announced a new line of DVDs called The Watchman Chronicles that will take on the subject of UFOs from the perspective that strange lights in the sky are the work of flying demons who intend to deceive humanity into believing in space aliens rather than demons. Demons have complicated plans. It’s usually best not to ask questions.
My modem died. The modem had been getting inconsistent in its performance and needed to be reset with increasing frequency, and then it died completely. So, I had to waste part of the day swapping it out and setting up a new wi-fi network. The bad news is that I lost several work hours, but the good news is that my new wi-fi network is faster and stronger. But since I am behind schedule, my blog post today will have to be a bit shorter than usual.
A few days ago I mentioned that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos called for activists and government to stand up against professors indoctrinating students. Now in Arkansas a ridiculous new bill introduced by one extremist state legislator aims to ban all books by leftist historians Howard Zinn from public school libraries and classrooms for being, essentially, liberal. While likely unconstitutional, the bill is a reminder that government is never more than a minute from trying to legislate truth and corrupt history for political ends. Banning authors—and historians no less!—is the first step toward imposing official government truths. Fortunately, for now it’s just one legislator’s bad idea.
A controversy arose this past week when anthropologists discovered that white supremacists had manipulated Google’s page ranking algorithm to make a racist and anti-Semitic hate site the snippet chosen for Google’s instant answer to queries about the definition of Boasian anthropology. “Boasian Anthropology is a pseudo-scientific Jewish assault on White European racial consciousness and identity,” the Google info-box informed its readers, taking the text from a white nationalist blog. Google expressed regret over the situation but said that the company had no responsibility to evaluate the content they excerpt: “The feature is an automatic and algorithmic match to the search query,” a Google spokesperson told The Verge. This is disingenuous, of course, since Google knows full well that many users cannot distinguish between a third-party snippet and an “official” Google-endorsed definition, particularly since Google offers similar-looking info-boxes for dictionary definitions, mathematical calculations, and other facts it presents as its own. Within hours of the controversy erupting, however, the anti-Semitic result disappeared from the Google top results.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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