​As almost everyone reading this knows, Robert Bauval, Graham Hancock, Robert Schoch, and their friends have made a career out of claiming that the Great Sphinx of Giza was carved in the time of Atlantis, around 10,500 BCE. This number derives, ultimately, from a combination of a belief in the existence of Plato’s Atlantis prior to 9600 BCE, the dating of the end of the last Ice Age, and, above all, to the idea that the Sphinx’s leonine form was meant to gaze at the constellation Leo on the spring equinox, something which would only have happened during the so-called “Age of Leo,” when the slow drifting of the stars placed Leo in that position from 10,500 BCE to 8,000 BCE.

​After two days of writing long blog posts that required a great deal of energy, I need to step back and take a little bit of a rest. What better way than to take a look at the newly released promotional materials for fringe historian and sometime Ancient Aliens pundit Andrew Collins’s newest book, The Cygnus Key: The Denisovan Legacy, Göbekli Tepe, and the Birth of Egypt, due out next May from Bear & Company. As you can guess from the title, Collins has a bizarre and highly speculative revisionist history of civilization, tracing it back to the as yet poorly understood subspecies or species represented by bones from Denisova Cave in Siberia. The Denisovans, at present, are known only from a few bones from four individuals, and they lived around 100,000 to 45,000 years ago.

​To briefly follow up on yesterday’s post: Ancient Origins has now posted the second part of Hugh Newman’s article on giants in Egypt, and it is worse than the first. The thrust of the article is his belief that hieratic scale in art—in which the artist depicts more important people as larger than less important ones—proves that the pharaohs were giants. This makes about as much sense as arguing that Abraham Lincoln was an ogre because his statue in the Lincoln Memorial is 19 feet tall, representing a man who would stand 28 feet in height. Clearly the artist meant to imply that Lincoln was bigger than a barn. The real Lincoln stood six foot four inches—tall but not Nephilim tall.

​Yesterday I had a bit of a mishap with the vacuum cleaner. It caught the Velcro strap that is used to tie up my computer’s AC adapter, and it sucked the whole cord in, destroying the connecter at the end. And of course my laptop uses a non-standard adapter, so there is no place within 50 miles that sells a compatible one. The manufacturer’s billing system crashed when I tried to order a replacement, which meant that the shipping deadline passed. Now, thanks to the holiday weekend, I have to hope that it will arrive on Friday or else I will be sans computer until next week.

​Good news, everyone! Robert Bauval, the purveyor of The Orion Mystery, has finally admitted to being an ancient astronaut theorist. I’ve suspected this for decades, ever since Bauval admitted in The Orion Mystery that his inspiration for the book was the ancient astronaut speculation of Robert Temple. His frequent appearances on Ancient Aliens were also a strong hint. But Bauval has long pretended to be interested only in Graham Hancock’s lost civilization. However, in December he will release a new book with panspermia advocate Chandra Wickramasinghe called Cosmic Womb: The Seeding of Planet Earth (Bear & Company, 2017) in which Bauval and Wickramasinghe argue that Earth life was purposely seeded from the stars by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization and that ancient people were aware of this fact. This is an early review of the forthcoming book courtesy of galley proofs made available by the publisher

​A long time ago, before I was born, Uri Geller was famous as a spoon-bender, and it is rather astonishing that “spoon-bender” was ever a profession, even if he was technically supposed to be some kind of telekinetic. His repertoire of tricks was always rather threadbare, and I can remember amazing my New Age classmates in anthropology classes by doing the spoon-bending trick and making objects move with the power of my “mind.” I performed such tricks—based on physics and misdirection—because one of my classmates claimed with a straight face that Buddhism had given him telekinetic powers, and he tried the same prestidigitation but called it a spiritual miracle. He also claimed he could levitate, but only when no one else was around to see. 

​I saw on the Ancient Origins Facebook page a series of photographs depicting what are claimed to be “Paleo-Sanskrit” inscriptions on broken tablets recovered from the geological formation known as the Yonaguni Monument because lost civilization believers think the underwater rock is the remains of an Ice Age temple. The pictures were new to me, but apparently they have been in circulation online for at least two years as part of a Hindu supremacist effort to argue that Yonaguni is a Vedic site.

​Before I begin today, I have an announcement: This past week, I welcomed into the world my son, and it has been an exciting and hectic time for everyone! He is a healthy and active newborn, and he weighed in at almost 10 pounds, which was quite a surprise, and as you can imagine, it has been a bit of a transition. As a result of my new arrival, I will no longer be able to review Ancient Aliens episodes in real time as they air. Depending on the baby’s schedule, I will try to fit it in sometime over the weekend, but I can’t guarantee it. Over the next few weeks, you will see the number of blog posts decrease while I take some much-deserved paternity leave, and also because I don’t think I can write on zero sleep.
 
Now, on to today’s discussion of the American Heroes Channel’s efforts to compete with Ancient Aliens.

​Last week, Graham Hancock and Michael Shermer debated the existence of a lost Ice Age civilization on the Joe Rogan Experience, and as I noted at the time, it did not make either man look good. Shermer was at times unprepared and often uninspiring, while Hancock was emotional instead of logical and far too quick to anger over every moment of disagreement. Similar anger issues emerged when Hancock attacked skeptic Marc Defant, the author of a harsh forthcoming review of Hancock’s Magicians of the Gods in Skeptic magazine, one that was available online in draft form from January until last week. (The Google cache copy is here.) Well, Hancock seems to have recognized that getting angry isn’t a good look for him, and on Facebook he has tried for some damage control with a pseudo-apology in which he pretends to feel sorry that his tone was unpleasant while, in reality, throwing himself a pity party:

​Well, that was unusual, and a little embarrassing. Yesterday afternoon (Pacific time) in his more than three-hour podcast, Joe Rogan hosted skeptic Michael Shermer, amateur geologist Randall Carlson, and journalist Graham Hancock, along with a pair of additional guests in the third hour, to debate Hancock’s claim that a comet destroyed an advanced civilization at the end of the last ice age. Shermer more or less blew it. He spoke above the level of the audience, threw kitchen-sink arguments at Hancock, and, worst of all, focused so heavily on the negative that he came across as a scold. The problem is that he is no expert in archaeology, so he spent more time discussing the burden of proof than the origins and development of Hancock’s claims. He couldn’t quite speak to the awe and wonder of the past; instead, he spoke of academic conferences and the proper way to debate new facts. Even when he tried to speak to the amazing antiquity of Göbekli Tepe, he couldn’t quite match Hancock’s fluidly British debate team polish. Skeptics need spokespeople who can speak with passion.

Shermer was not happy that I found his end of the debate lacking and attacked me on Twitter, and later apologized for what he called a “raw moment”: