Are you or someone you know in a sexual relationship with a space alien or a ghost? According to ghost hunter and ancient astronaut believer Maija Polsley, writing in the New York Daily News, sex with supernatural creatures is all the rage, and celebrities like Elementary star Lucy Liu, singer Kesha, and Paranormal Activity 2 actress Natasha Blasick have extolled the orgasmic virtues of ethereal lovers. “I really enjoyed it,” Blasick said. “Sheer bliss!” Liu raved.
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I can’t help but share the crazy quilt of nuttiness that I discovered in the work of an obscure fellow named Carl von Rikart, a German (pseudonymous according to the Edinburgh Review) who in 1869 published a book called Menes and Cheops Identified in History Under Different Names. In that book, von Rikart attempted to argue that Egyptologists were blinkered by their small-minded anti-Bible stance and therefore did not recognize that the Pharaohs of Egypt were the characters of the Bible. For example, he equates both Menes and Khufu with Noah’s son Shem and claims that Abraham convinced Shem to build the Great Pyramid to symbolize God’s covenant.
At one point or another, the producers of Ancient Aliens changed the show in a subtle but important way. The early seasons of the program, while nutty, badly researched, and occasionally fraudulent, maintained at least a token respect for the viewers it supposedly existed to entertain. At some point the producers started treating the audience as a collection of idiots, 1.1 million of whom will show up no matter what the program tells them. Maybe it started around the time that the show actively encouraged Satan worship and then realized that no one objected. Maybe it was around the time that they started assembling whole episodes out of recycled content from past episodes and realized that it made no difference to their ratings.
Tonight Ancient Aliens returns after a one-week hiatus with a depressing episode in which they take Talbot Mundy’s fictional group of Nine Unknown Men, equate them with the Greek account of the Egyptian Ennead, and make them into a real galactic council. While we wait for them to transform science fiction into pseudoscience, I wanted to share a bit of Nick Redfern’s latest article for Mysterious Universe, in which he discovered that many of the people involved in Fortean research range from obsessive to mentally ill.
I wrote a lot yesterday, and I’m feeling a bit lazy today. I have three small items to share.
The first comes to us courtesy of Graham Hancock, who posted a completely bizarre captioned photo to his blog after visiting California. There Hancock saw very old trees, some of which are thousands of years old. “What if they are the antennae of vast cosmic beings who are watching humanity and the earth?” he said in the caption to a photo of one such tree taken by his wife. Is Hancock back on pot again? Some New Age types have been floating the idea that trees serve as antennae to focus earth energy, but Hancock seems to be making them into sentient beings linked to Old Ones from beyond our ken. He even titled his post “The Watchers,” invoking intentionally or not the Fallen Angels and the forbidden wisdom of the antediluvian era. Earlier this week former Treasure Force Commander and current History Heretic J. Hutton Pulitzer delivered a two-hour-long Periscope presentation in which he discussed his latest speculations about Oak Island. In so doing, he made an extraordinary and quite ridiculous claim, namely that he has located the underwater tomb of a famous figure from Antiquity, possibly that of Hercules himself!
Tuesday Roundup: Giants' Bones in Russia, Medieval Malians in the Southwestern US, and More!7/5/2016 This weekend I watched X-Men: Apocalypse, which I found to be less awful than critics claimed, though not terribly enjoyable. I mention it though because I was struck by the opening sequence, which seemed to draw so much from the medieval Arab-Egyptian pyramid myth of Surid. In the scene, the evil godlike mutant Apocalypse uses high technology on sarcophagus-like beds within a secret chamber under a giant pyramid to engage in mind transfer into a new body, powered by solar panels atop his pyramid that are kept covered in silk drapery until the time is right. Such elements—the silken covering, the labyrinth of hidden chambers, the technological sarcophagi to preserve bodies—can all be found in the versions of the medieval story of Surid given in part in the Akhbar al-zaman and more fully in al-Maqrizi. I am not terribly familiar with the comics’ version of Apocalypse, created in the 1990s, but it is my understanding the film version is a bit different from the comics’ origin story for him and uses material from comic stories set in the distant future.
Remember what a surprise it was last year when Graham Hancock finally admitted that his “lost civilization” was really Atlantis? Remember, too, how Hancock and fellow fringe writer Andrew Collins got into a bit of a passive-aggressive tiff when Hancock borrowed a bunch of Collins’s material for Magicians of the Gods before criticizing Collins, and Collins then gave Magicians a positive review that somehow ended up praising Collins more? Well Collins has now returned the favor by piggybacking on the publicity surrounding Hancock’s comet hypothesis (or more accurately Ignatius Donnelly’s) to argue that Atlantis was in the Caribbean and was destroyed by a comet. Yes, it’s Magicians of the Gods all over again, but this time it’s called Atlantis in the Caribbean and the Comet that Changed the World (Bear & Company, 2016).
I appeared yesterday on the Free Thought Prophet podcast to discuss the ancient astronaut theory. I assumed I would just post the podcast and have that as my holiday weekend blog post. Then Scott Wolter started another dumpster fire with his newest claims. So, let me first post my podcast appearance, and then we can discuss Wolter’s newest Masonic malpractice. Ancient Aliens had the week off for the Independence Day holiday, but last week the show managed to crawl back a bit from the previous week’s abysmal ratings. Last Friday, the show just barely crossed the one million viewer mark, hitting 1.09 million viewers. The series’ executive producer, Kevin Burns, also announced that he is taking on a new job: He’s signed on as a writer for the 10-episode Netflix and Legendary Entertainment reboot of Lost in Space. I guess it’s appropriate. On Ancient Aliens he’s already proved himself adept at recycling old science fiction.
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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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