While skimming through some of the FBI paranormal files presented in The Black Vault, I came across a fascinating letter sent from Tiffany Thayer, the secretary of the Fortean Society, to Jennings C. Wise, a soldier and lawyer, regarding their shared belief that the New World had been colonized from Europe before Columbus. This letter ended up in the FBI files not because they cared in the least about diffusionism but rather because Thayer was being investigated for sedition due to his controversial publications in the Forteans’ official journal denouncing World War II as “World Fraud II” and alleging that the Great Powers conspired to foment war. Thayer would be investigated several more times, including once for claiming that “FBI men outnumber the Communists on our rolls by 2 to 1,” prompting an outraged Hoover to send agents to demand Thayer prove that Bureau men were subscribes to Doubt. (Thayer eventually withdrew the claim.)
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An article by Tara MacIsaac published both in Ancient Origins and the Epoch Times this week reports on a three-decade-old diffusionist article by David H. Kelley, newly published in the subscription diffusionist publication Pre-Columbiana. The piece was originally written for a “major” science journal in the 1980s and was allegedly rejected, according to Pre-Columbiana, for being too scholarly. Kelley’s article alleges that the similarities between the Maya and Chinese calendars show that they could only have derived from a single source.
This week Nephilim-hunter L. A. Marzulli appeared on TradCatKnight radio, a podcast of “traditional Catholicism,” to discuss giants. He began, in typical fashion, by announcing his belief that we are in the middle of a “seed war” between the human descendants of Adam and Eve and the “seed” of the Serpent, i.e. Satan. This “seed” is the Nephilim, the evil giants who are waiting to destroy righteousness, just as they have been waiting since before Noah’s Flood. In other words, they’re not very good at it, but we should be afraid of them anyway, at least enough to give money to L. A. Marzulli for his books and videos about being afraid of the Nephilim.
Why a 300-Year-Old Latin Book from Germany Almost Certainly Does Not Depict a Flying Saucer9/7/2016 It’s been a long time since we’ve had an ancient astronaut claim in the “classic” style, so I was delighted to see that The Black Vault is getting rather excited over a 1716 book that it says “clearly has a flying saucer shaped craft depicted in it’s (sic) cover art.” This turned out to be a fun, old-school example of ignorance bubbling up into ancient astronaut theories.
In the Women’s Weekly magazine in Australia, there is a profile of an amateur exorcist named Peter Whiffin, who provides both in-person and Skype exorcisms through prayer and blowing a shofar.
Over at the A Hot Cup of Joe, Carl Feagans has a thoughtful analysis of the disturbing implications of recent social media postings from Xplrr Media about “200” skulls in Peru that are most likely deformed due to ritual head binding and which Feagans says seem to have been found in an area looted by grave robbers. (The woman who found the skull says she works with an archaeologist, but that archaeologist is a member of UFO groups.) Xplrr Media said that the skulls are a “DNA game changer.” Xplrr’s owners said they are working on “access” to the remains to “test” the DNA of the deformed skulls. Why test their DNA? Who knows? The most common reasons to do so for fringe historians like Lloyd Pye, L. A. Marzulli, and Brien Foerster are to look for (a) aliens, (b) Nephilim, or (c) a lost white race respectively. The continuing quest for an Old World (or even out of this world) origin for New World civilizations brings me to my topic for today.
Last year, when I translated the Akhbār al-zamān, I was introduced to one of the weirded legends I have come across over the years, that of the plant-people known as the Wak-Wak: “One of the races that is most similar to man is that of the Wāḳwāḳ. These individuals hang from branches by their hair; they have breasts and sexual organs similar to those of women, and they have a ruddy complexion; they constantly shout “Wak Wak!”, and if one of these females is captured, it goes silent and falls dead.” This version of the legend is an abridgment of stories told by the Arab geographers going back to the eighth century CE, and probably derived from earlier oral tales the east.
I can’t say that I’m sorry to see it go. This episode of Ancient Aliens marked the end of its eleventh season (and seventh calendar year) on the air. This season was also the longest since season three, and the first I can remember to run almost uninterrupted. (It was off the day of the Olympic opening ceremony.) All told, this gave me Ancient Aliens fatigue, and it sapped some of the joy even out of pointing to such ridiculous missteps as citing the Weekly World News as a reliable source, as they did a few weeks ago. Fifteen episodes is just too much of a bad thing, but clearly History’s audience disagrees. Last week’s episode drew 1.12 million viewers, about even with its season average, a number that has rarely moved more than 10% up or down year after year.
It seemed fitting that the morning this episode aired, the Bizarro comic strip ran this: Since it’s the Friday before a holiday weekend, I know there’s a good chance that relatively few people will be reading this today. So I thought I’d start with something weird. Over in the Atlantic there is a bizarre article on how the idea of the multiverse is destroying culture, written by Sam Kriss, a British writer for Vice and other outlets who recently published a Wired story claiming that Neil deGrasse Tyson “sucks the fun” out of life. Kriss claims on his Idiot Joy Showland to “hate intellectuals” and advocates re-enchanting the world by abandoning scientific truth for a more emotionally satisfying worldview, and yet major magazines still publish his poorly constructed cris de coeur.
Today I have three follow-ups to discuss on the Kandahar giant, Rh-negative blood, and the FBI’s involvement with the Shaver Mystery. Oh, won’t it be fun!
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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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