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Frank Joseph and the Conference of the Crystal Skull

10/9/2019

I am indexing again today, but I wanted to share with you this post from the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society annual meeting in Michigan this week. In the picture, you’ll see the former head of the American Nazi Party, Frank Joseph, posing with a fake crystal skull that he and his friends believe dates back to the Atlantean age. For all the Indiana Jones cosplaying that you see in the world of pseudoarchaeology, it’s rare to see a real-life Indiana Jones villain. I think, though, that the movies got a bit mixed up. I’m pretty sure the communists were the villains in the Crystal Skull movie.

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Vandal Damages "America's Stonehenge" Cider Press Known as "Sacrificial Table"

10/8/2019

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I am really starting to feel the pressure of trying to proofread and index one book while writing a second as the deadlines for both loom. I find indexing and proofreading to be slow-going, particularly squeezing it in among other work. I hate to do it, but I’m going to have to rely on computer assistance to index proper nouns to save time. It’s problematic because it can introduce mistakes due to spelling and/or random similar names that then have to be manually reviewed, but it’s the only way to get through the book quickly enough given the minuscule time given to me. I have to learn to write books that are less fact-dense so each page has fewer indexable terms.

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Andrew Collins Is Having Trouble in Turkey

10/1/2019

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Proofreading and indexing is slow-going work, and I’m finding it challenging to fit enough of it into my workday to meet the deadline after the publisher delivered the page proofs late, cutting the indexing time way down. As a result, I am not going to be doing much blogging until the indexing and proofreading are done. The good news, for what it’s worth, is that indexing goes faster the deeper into a book I go because most of the index terms will have already been entered into the list, so by the time I am halfway through, it will mostly be autopilot.

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The "Antediluvian" Osirion at Abydos: A Century of Deceptively Copied Claims

9/20/2019

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Yesterday, Tom DeLonge of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science announced that the History Channel had renewed TTSA’s Unidentified series for a second season. The final episode of the first season drew just 926,000 viewers, or 0.28% of the U.S. population. For all the people not watching the show—some 99.72% of Americans—the series and its media co-conspirators have an outsize influence on public discourse thanks to the complicity of the news media.

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Review of "Denisovan Origins" by Andrew Collins and Gregory L. Little

9/10/2019

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Denisovan Origins: Hybrid Humans, Göbekli Tepe, and the Genesis of the Giants of Ancient America
Andrew Collins and Gregory L. Little | 432 pages | Bear & Company | ISBN: 1591432634 | $21.60

Denisovan Origins is a team-up between Andrew Collins and Greg Little, two authors whose combined oeuvre includes wild and extreme claims about history ranging from Atlantis and space aliens to giants and Nephilim. Their new book carries an endorsement from no less than Graham Hancock, who claims that the book uncovers a “missing chapter” of American history that supplements “my own book, America Before.” Normally, a publisher will give me a copy of a book and I will write a detailed review that—and this should surprise no one—also serves the publisher’s purpose of promoting the book. I didn’t get an advance copy of Denisovan Origins, in large measure because Andrew Collins reportedly was upset that the publisher had sent out copies of his last book several months ahead of publication, and I am not terribly interested in giving too much space over to promoting a book that the author and publisher wanted to hide from me. But in the interest of the public good, I will look at it anyway, even though it contains very little new material that isn’t repeating claims from the authors’ earlier books

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Göbekli Tepe and the Ancient Infrasound Global Communication System

8/30/2019

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I need to spend today working on writing my new book on pyramid myths before I review Ancient Aliens tonight, so I am going to leave you with this recent YouTube video claiming that Göbekli Tepe and other ancient sites were connected through an “infrasound” network that somehow transcended not just barriers of distance but also of time, communicating between cultures that didn’t even exist at the same time as one another. Many of the claims are warmed over from Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis and Edgar Cayce’s version of Atlantis, but you can see more than a little of the “energy network” claims from Ancient Aliens, particularly when the narrator alleges that the ancient stones received messages from other dimensions or other planets.

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Review of Code of the Wild S01E05 "Aztecs in America"

8/29/2019

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This episode airs Sept. 3.

For more than two centuries, scientists, historians, and treasure hunters have sought proof that Mesoamerican peoples visited or even colonized the lands now part of the continental United States. In the nineteenth century, this line of speculation tended to focus on the Aztecs, who had a myth of coming to Mexico from Aztlán, a land to the north of Mexico. Baron von Humboldt infamously placed Aztlán in the Great Lakes region on the evidence of a painting of a palm tree (don’t ask) and what amounted to some guesswork about how fast they might have walked across the 416 years of their wanderings from Aztlán to Mexico. “It is almost certain,” Humboldt wrote in Researches Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America (1810), “that we must look for the first country of the Mexican nations, Aztlan, Huehuetlapallan, and Amequemecan, at least North of the 42d degree of latitude” (trans. Helena Maria Williams). Humboldt’s claim was so persuasive that he succeeded in getting scholars to speak of the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan as “Aztecs” from Aztlán instead of the Mexica of Mexico.

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"The Atlantic" Repeats Afrocentrist Claim about Pre-Columbian Africans in the Americas; Plus: "Epoch Times" Under Fire for Trump Links

8/21/2019

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This past week, conservatives across the country rose up to take on the most pressing issue of the day, the New York Times’ ongoing series reporting on the continuing legacy of slavery on modern American life to mark the 400th anniversary of slavery in the lands that eventually became the United States. Conservative leaders claimed that the paper was doing a disservice to America by sowing division through a discussion of historical facts and making America look bad by explaining the compromises and corruptions that slavery created at the heart of the American social, economic, and political systems. In the Atlantic, Ibram X. Kendi of American University wrote in support of the Times’ project, but in doing so, he offered his own ahistorical claim.

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"Barnes Review" Claims "White Leadership" from Ancient Egypt Ruled the Maya

8/13/2019

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Originally, I planned to spend today’s blog post discussing Tom DeLonge’s recent interview in the British music magazine NME, in which he claimed to have secret knowledge that he has adjudged too dangerous for public consumption: “Believe it or not, we have very long conversations about what we’re going to talk about publicly, not because we don’t have the facts – but because people aren’t ready for the facts,” he said. This seems transparently false. If an aging rock star whose sum total of knowledge of UFOs, ancient history, and the occult is derived, by his own admission, from reading old paperback ufology books has experienced “the facts” and emerged unscathed, surely we mere mortals can hear whatever it is DeLonge thinks he knows (but probably doesn’t). I also thought it worth mentioning that Luis Elizondo, who two Pentagon spokespeople have denied served as the head of the Pentagon’s UFO tracking program, declined to provide evidence that he did head it when asked. “I don’t want to make anyone look foolish,” he said. Sure, that’s the reason.

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Martin Sweatman Claims Göbekli Tepe Was a "University" Teaching Civilization to Africa, Europe, and Asia

8/6/2019

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Look who’s back… again. Martin Sweatman wrote an academic journal article back in 2017 alleging that the ancient temple site of Göbekli Tepe contained carvings recording the impact of a comet at the end of the Younger Dryas and that its iconography is derived from the zodiac, a set of constellations first seen in the historical record 10,000 years later in Babylon. In December Sweatman expanded his claims into a full-length book, PreHistory Decoded, which he is promoting this month on Graham Hancock’s website. Despite the passing of the years, the quality of the evidence for Sweatman’s position has yet to grow more convincing since it remains founded on speculative (pseudo-)astronomy and the books of Andrew Collins and Graham Hancock, whom he praises by name as “closer to the truth” than actual scholars.

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