As I’m sure most of you are aware, over the weekend two conspiracy theorists with radical views about the New World Order ambushed and killed two Las Vegas police officers and killed another person before turning the gun on themselves. The killers, Jerad and Amanda Miller, shared extreme anti-government views and believed in a coming tyranny, one predicted by right wing extremists and regularly promoted in conspiracy circles and even on cable television shows.
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Every week I start out with the same intention to review Penny Dreadful, and every week I find myself ending up with something completely different. This week’s episode (S01E05 “Closer than Sisters”) was, for me, a disappointing bore—an hour-long flashback showing the viewers in great detail the back story of Vanessa Ives, one that was mostly already known from previous episodes and could have been given in its entirety in about 3 minutes of airtime. Your enjoyment, I imagine, varies based on your tolerance for long, slow stories that have very little by way of plot development and even less that could be described as horror rather than as a Thomas Hardy novel with slight supernatural overtones. (It has some echoes of Tess of the D’Urbervilles.) I will give the show this: The stately homes in which the episode was shot were gorgeous.
I’m continuing to make my way through the May-June 2014 issue of Scott Alan Roberts’s Intrepid magazine, and today the awfulness continues. I have some thoughts about most of the pieces in the magazine, though I skipped two articles on psychics and metaphysics to concentrate on claims about prehistory.
After Nick Redfern’s piece about Bigfoot-UFO connections that dealt with material from 1950-1980, I thought it might be fun to keep track of how many articles were rehashing midcentury material. I’ve noted the dates of each article’s referenced or inspirational idea at the end of each discussion. It was enlightening. Regular readers will remember Scott Alan Roberts as the organizer of the Paradigm Symposium, that gathering of ancient astronaut and fringe history types, and also as a fringe history writer in his own right, one who has unique ideas about the Nephilim, Reptilians, and racial purity. Roberts is also the publisher of Intrepid magazine, the “official publication” of the KGRA Digital Radio Network and one of a series of fringe history magazines like Atlantis Rising and Ancient American. I’ve obtained a copy of the current issue of Intrepid (2.3, May-June 2014), and it has some, shall we say, interesting material. Today will be the first of a few posts analyzing the magazine to evaluate the very latest in fringe research.
Today, for a change of pace, I thought I’d talk about some recent—and weird—references to H. P. Lovecraft in the news. Let’s begin with Escape from Zombie Earth, Scotty Richards’s comic book mini-series inspired by Lovecraft and set in an Arkham, Massachusetts overrun with the undead. According to Kalkion writer Patrick Dooley, the comic took its inspiration from “one of the first zombie stories ever written, H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Re-animator.”
Scott Wolter: Cosmic Forces Have "Profound Impact" on History, Templars Gave Natives Jesus Genes6/5/2014 On May 16, Scott Wolter appeared on a radio program called Truth Connections on the UFO Paranormal Radio Network. The program opens hilariously with the host’s technical problems, followed by her utter inability to read Scott Wolter’s promotional copy about himself in anything like a convincing way. However, it’s worth nothing that Wolter’s promotion copy claims that he has investigated “5,000” prehistoric mysteries, and it reads explicitly that his intention in his research is “adding to the mystery that many European visitors came here prior to Columbus, and our history is not what we’ve been led to believe.”
That ought to put to rest any doubts about Wolter’s intentions vis-à-vis Europeans influence in America versus those of non-European peoples. "Slender Man" Stabber Wanted to Kill Friend to "Prove Skeptics Wrong" about the Supernatural6/4/2014 I’m sure by now many of you have heard the tragic story of the two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls who stabbed a friend 19 times because they were inspired by the internet meme Slender Man. The story is sad on many levels, but it was particularly disturbing how the impressionable girls thought that the internet meme had a reality beyond fiction and that by engaging in real-life violence they could join Slender Man in some sort of communion.
Slender Man was invented as a piece of art in 2009 by Eric Knudsen on the Something Awful internet forum. This week is yet another Nazi week on the American Heroes Channel. On Sunday night, AHC broadcasted an episode of Myth Hunters on the “Nazi Hunt for Atlantis” (S02E07), which indicated its intention to examine Nazi efforts to seek out the Aryan master race from Atlantis. Then last night they offered up a new special, Hitler’s Jurassic Zoo, which was advertised as a look into Nazi efforts to create a prehistoric game preserve. Neither show was what it seemed to be. I was genuinely surprised, given its ridiculous title, that Hitler’s Jurassic Zoo was by far the superior offering.
Every week I think I might have something interesting to say about Penny Dreadful, and every week I find that my thoughts turn to other and better dramas that manage to have more—and more interesting—things to say about horror, monsters, and the Victorian period.
America Unearthed makes people angry, especially the type of people who go on America Unearthed. It seems that they make enemies wherever they go. In the past, we’ve heard from Scott Dawson about his deep anger at the show for promising a sober documentary about Roanoke and then spending the filming day attacking Dawson for his refusal to agree with pseudoscience. We’ve seen bookbinder Joe Rose express his upset that America Unearthed misrepresented his views to make it look like he supported factually inaccurate claims about Mithraism. Other guests have made similar claims that they had been taken out of context or misrepresented or had important parts of their statements omitted. Today we can add another name to this list of the program’s discontents.
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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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