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Review of Unexplained + Unexplored S01E05: Hunt for the Ark of the Covenant

12/9/2019

Watching cable television today, it’s easy to think that the search for the Ark of the Covenant has dominated archaeology and historiography for the past 2,500 years. Yet a review of the Euro-American literature finds that this wasn’t really the case at all. The Ark is rarely mentioned down to the twentieth century except in religious discussions of Old Testament times. Indeed, Anglican clergyman William Henry Havergal’s sixth lecture on the Ark of the Covenant, presented in the 1860s, “In the total loss of the ark, and in the entire demolition of the Jewish system, let us discern the low estimate which God sets upon his most exalted institutions, in comparison with the living realities, which they were intended to foreshadow” (emphasis in original). In other words, Christians believed that the Ark wasn’t important because it was a mere forerunner of Christ, who replaced it. Indeed, in the 1890s, writers made fairly frequent reference to the Ark of the Covenant being kept in Axum, Ethiopia, and basically nobody cared. Even when Fascist Italy conquered Ethiopia, they did not bother to go after the Ark.

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Weekend Odds and Ends

12/7/2019

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Last week saw the last new episode of Ancient Aliens for 2019. The episode trended down from the previous week, bringing in 897,000 viewers, compared to 925,000 for the Tucker Carlson episode the week before. The numbers suggest that at least some of the previous week’s viewer spike was attributable to Carlson fans tuning in, but the numbers are so small that the greater part is probably due to random fluctuation. In Search Of had 963,000 viewers for its final episode of the season. Meanwhile, the Science Channel conspiracy fringe history series Unexplained + Unexplored trended up to 441,000 viewers for its episode hunting the alleged killer of Meriwether Lewis.

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Deep Prasad Describes Totally Not a Dream Alien Encounter

12/6/2019

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Apparently, it is dream week here on my blog, since Silicon Valley entrepreneur turned UFO enthusiast Deep Prasad posted a long Twitter thread this past weekend outlining what he claims to be his own UFO experience. Regular readers will remember Prasad because he planned to use Silicon Valley resources to hunt UFOs, and because he criticized me on Twitter for doubting claims about “alien” metamaterials. His recent Twitter thread was collected and published by the aptly named Hot Air, and I think you’ll quickly see that the supposed encounter is almost certainly not what Prasad thinks it is. Here is the most relevant part. The story occurs three months after Prasad began obsessive UFO studies and shortly after the suicide of an acquaintance that he said left him “traumatized.”

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Pre-Modern UFOs and the Power of Dreams

12/5/2019

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Last month, researcher Chris Aubeck gave an interview to Danish writer Thomas Brisson Jørgensen of the Vomanomalous blog on the subject of UFOs, particularly on accounts of pre-1947 UFO-style encounters with objects from the sky and their alleged occupants. In the interview he discusses some strange stories from old books, though without specific references and links, there is no way for me to identify the stories. Some are quite bizarre, like an old tale of a rocket-like ship from which emerged a being who got into a horseless carriage. If I find myself interested enough, I’ll ask him for the references, but today I am more concerned to discuss some of the broader themes that he discussed in the interview.

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No New Blog Today

12/4/2019

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My original intention was to review Unexplored + Unexplained today, but the Science Channel has locked the most recent episode, which I am unable to view because the network is not included in my cable package. Oh, well. No loss to me. Meriwether Lewis is still dead, and I did not need another conspiracy theory about it. Meanwhile, here near Albany we received two feet of snow, and I had to spend much of the last two days clearing snow. I did not have time to write a blog post, especially after I devoted so much time this weekend to reading and reviewing Gods, Man, and War 2. Normally, I would have divided the book review in parts anyway, but I thought that putting it up as one blog post would be more useful to anyone looking for information about the book. Let us say that it counts for two or maybe three posts this week.

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Review of "Gods, Man, & War 2: Man" by Tom DeLonge with Peter Levenda

12/3/2019

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When I was young, I thought the apocryphal words of the Caliph Omar on the burning of the Library of Alexandria to be horrible. “If these books agree with the Koran, they are useless; if they disagree, they are pernicious: in either case, they ought to be destroyed.” While the religious sentiment still strikes me as offensive, the older I get the more I have come to realize that too many books are bullshit in dust jackets. Would we really be worse off if books that were full of lies were sent to be pulped and those that added nothing new to the store of human knowledge were never written? Currently, publishers print more than 100,000 titles each year, and 99% of them are read by almost no one. We could do with fewer, and the newest volume of Gods, Man, & War could easily have joined the pile of worthless volumes that would have made the world a better place for not existing.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E22 "Secrets of the Exoplanets"

11/29/2019

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Last week, Ancient Aliens surged in the overall ratings, up to 925,000 live plus same day viewers, up about a third from its season 14 average. However, it’s demo ratings among the coveted 18-49-year-old age group fell again, meaning that the surge in viewers was driven by those 49 and up. Since this is also the same demographic that watches Tucker Carlson, who guest starred on Ancient Aliens last week, I’m guessing the Fox News cross-promotion helped goose Ancient Aliens’ ratings. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that its lead-out, In Search Of, which had been outpacing Ancient Aliens for most of its season, didn’t move the needle very much week-to-week while the Fox-infused Aliens soared. I write about this in the introduction to this episode because there are few topics I have less interest in than Earth-like exoplanets beyond our solar system, whose existence I have long assumed and whose properties are for me mostly an academic exercise since there is no chance that humans will visit them in my lifetime, and there is a statistically insignificant chance that space aliens, should they live there, would ever manage to reach Earth, given the vast distances involved.

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Review of Unexplained + Unexplored S01E03 "Knights Templar in America"

11/27/2019

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Would you trust the unearthing of history’s deepest secrets to Baron Ambrosia, the “quaffer of culinary consciousness” from New York City public access television and the Cooking Channel’s The Adventures of Baron Ambrosia? The Science Channel trusts the flamboyant showman, whose real name is Justin Fornal, to remake himself as an “international explorer and cultural detective” (he is primarily a travel writer and film producer for National Geographic and Vice) in a new series in which he and his exploration partner, Emiliano Ruprah, a longtime cable TV producer, basically remake old episodes of the Travel Channel / History Channel pseudoscience series America Unearthed but with a twist—each one is based on an old map! Woo-hoo. The first episode remade the America Unearthed episode about the California “Viking” ghost ship from this past season (newsflash: they didn’t find it either), and the second episode revisited the season three America Unearthed episode about the treasure of the Superstition Mountains (they didn’t find it either). Future episodes will retrace Wolter’s hunts for Meriwether Lewis’s “real” killer and the Ark of the Covenant.

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Famed Historian to Appear Alongside Ancient Astronaut Theorists at History Channel Convention

11/27/2019

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Several months ago, the PR flak representing Tom DeLonge contacted me to ask if I wanted a review copy of DeLonge’s and Peter Levenda’s new book Gods, Man, & War, Volume 2: Man: An Official Sekret Machines Investigation of the UFO Phenomenon by Tom DeLonge with Peter Levenda. It’s a mouthful, but I said, sure, why not. After the original publication date passed (later pushed to December) and the several weeks went by, I assumed that they weren’t sending the book. Imagine my surprise when yesterday, almost a month after I had given up, a box showed up with a hardcover printing of GM&W2M—an initialism I now realize looks more like an online hookup tag than a book title. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised that they kept their word, albeit very late. Credit where it is due: They are much braver than the History Channel, New Page Books, and the other companies that have banned me from receiving review copies of their products. My plan is to take the holiday weekend to read the book and then review it on Tuesday of next week.

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Graham Hancock Reacts to SAA Archaeological Record Articles on "America Before"

11/26/2019

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I’ve told this story before, but it is worth repeating here. When I was in college, a Jewish classmate angrily refused to ride in, or consider purchasing, a Chrysler PT Cruiser because he considered its 1930s-style aesthetics offensive. He thought it looked like a “Hitler car.” Instead, he was inordinately proud to have purchased a brand new, apple green Volkswagen Beetle, ignorant of the fact that it was almost literally a Hitler car. Hitler personally sketched a rough concept for the Volkswagen Beetle, and the Nazis founded Volkswagen to build them (though World War II prevented actual production). I was reminded of this story when Graham Hancock reacted to last week’s special issue of The SAA Archaeological Record, which devoted a lengthy, multi-article section to Hancock’s America Before, including an article by me.

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