On July 10, Ancient Aliens pundit and prolific conspiracy author Jim Marrs appeared on William Henry’s Revelations radio show to discuss ancient aliens in advance of the Contact in the Desert symposium currently going on in Joshua Tree. Marrs was promoting his new book, whose name I refuse to publicize thanks to HarperCollins’ refusal to provide me a review copy. Marrs’s book detailed his belief that world governments are conspiring to cover up knowledge of ancient astronauts, and in so doing, Marrs recycled century-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, exchanging the Jews for aliens and in one case making the Jews into aliens trying to suck the gold and lifeblood from Christian America.
(Full disclosure: Last year Henry, who believes that telephone booths are esoteric symbols of the wormhole through which Jesus travels the universe, asked me on his radio show, and I recorded an episode that he decided not to use after discovering that I am in fact not a believer in ancient astronauts.)
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In doing some research, I came across a decade-old book by Ancient Aliens pundit David Childress that I hadn’t heard of: Pirates and the Lost Templar Fleet (2003), in which the irrepressible author tells us that the “lost” fleet of the Knights Templar became a roving band of pirates menacing the American coast for several centuries! I guess this is a little better than imagining that they claimed the entire Mississippi watershed for the imaginary children of Jesus, but not by much. The book appears to have been designed to tie in to two then-popular products, The Da Vinci Code and Pirates of the Caribbean, both released in 2003.
One of the reasons I’ve been picking on America Unearthed and its weird vision of an early America overrun with manly European knights in armor raping and pillaging their way across hill and dale is that this type of historical revisionism—which lacks any factual basis—has historically served as the entrepôt for racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic political ideologies. So naturally it should surprise no one that Glenn Beck supports these odd theories. A few years ago, he tried to rehabilitate the Bat Creek Stone, excited by Scott Wolter’s attempt to authenticate the alleged piece of prehistoric Hebrew writing. This week Beck went on a bizarre historical rant about the Bible and Jews that deserves a closer examination, both for its mind-boggling inaccuracies and its insight into the conspiratorial mindset of so many.
H2 "Betting Big" on "America Unearthed" While Scott Wolter Probes Masonic Conspiracy to Kill Lincoln8/8/2013 In an interview with Adweek magazine, Mel Berning, the president of ad sales at A+E Networks, the parent of H2, said that the media giant was “betting big” on America Unearthed as the key program for repositioning the History spinoff channel as the go-to destination for upscale men. According to Berning, not only are ad sales up across the A+E family of networks, but the two History channels bring in more male viewers than most other non-sports programming. Two-thirds of the two networks’ viewers are male, according to the most recent available statistics.
(Full disclosure: A+E Networks threatened legal action against me this spring over the title and cover design of my book on America Unearthed, which we settled more or less amicably.) I have two topics to discuss today, which are not really related closely enough for me to try to make something coherent out of it. So, instead, I’m going to just discuss them separately. First up, I want to briefly comment on an interesting point that arose during my discussion of Discovery’s fake documentary, Megalodon: namely, why did the media care so much about this instance of fakery? The reason is simple, and I won’t sugarcoat it: The media think people who watched this were smart and rich like them, and they are outraged on their behalf. If you watched fake stuff on the History channel or H2, then you are old and poor and deserve to be fooled, you economically unworthy scum of the earth.
On Fake Documentaries and Why Giorgio Tsoukalos Doesn't Want to Know Where the Aliens Come From8/6/2013 It looks like there’s finally starting to be a little bit of a backlash against the rampant fakery in cable documentaries, thanks to, of all things, extinct sharks. On Sunday the Discovery Channel aired a fictional pseudo-documentary on the megalodon, a prehistoric shark. Called Megaladon: The Monster Shark Lives, program claimed that the long-extinct creature was still alive, and a team of actors portrayed scientists and others commenting on the existence of the creature, sightings of the creature, and legends of large sharks. The documentary had a very small, poorly-worded disclaimer that “certain events and characters in this film have been dramatized.”
On the Miskatonic University Podcast, at around the 1 hour and 23 minute mark of the August 4 edition, you can hear a skeptical discussion of H2’s pseudo-history program America Unearthed and my coverage of the show: “It’s sort of an angry blog. He blogs about it angrily.” No, not angrily—I blog somewhere between disappointed and outraged. But as I am about to discuss, it almost never happened at all. I almost became an entertainment journalist. Can you imagine?
You’ll remember, I’m sure, the initial post I did last week about Jim Vieira’s claim on Facebook that the Smithsonian was covering up the existence of giants. I wrote a post in which I discussed the origins of this claim, and Vieira has chosen to respond on Facebook (post of Friday, August 2) by attacking me for what I did not write. As you’ll recall, the post focused on the origins of the Smithsonian cover-up claim, but instead Vieira has taken it as some kind of global debunking of the existence of skeletons taller than 6’6”. As I discussed yesterday, there is nothing abnormal or supernatural about certain individuals reaching above-average heights.
So let’s see what Vieira has to say. Micah Hanks replied at great length in the comments to my previous blog post about the alleged Smithsonian conspiracy to hide the truth about the existence of giants, and I feel his thoughtful reply requires a longer follow-up than a single comment. Hanks conceded that he understood how I read his article on the subject, though he feels that I misread his article. He includes this information amidst a paragraph preemptively suggesting that “many” (though I hope not me) would attack his friends at Anomalist.com and Doubtful News (and thus him) for insufficient skepticism; this, of course, is a red herring since the advocate is not synonymous with the claim, and anyone—of whatever stripe—can contribute productively to an investigation provided that the evidence is sufficient to justify the claim.
I don’t really have much analysis to add to this article on sculpture artist Matthew Welter, but it certainly goes a long way toward explaining some of the reasons I think it’s important to advocate for truth. Welter is selling two sculptures of the Sphinx and an Easter Island head for a combined $30,000 in order to raise money for a sculpture of Thomas Jefferson, whom Welter believes knew the truth about Zecharia Sitchin’s alien Anunnaki since Jefferson is the only president depicted on Mount Rushmore as “looking at the sky.”
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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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