As we approach the New Year, it’s time to take a final look back at 2017 in fringe history. This was a year when political news overshadowed almost everything else, but 2017 still managed to find new ways to use and abuse history, rivalling the historic low of 2016. This year in fringe history might not have been more extreme than last year, but it was certainly darker. It was the year when fringe historians rejoiced that they had an ally in the White House whose courtiers proudly flew the banner of “alternative facts,” but more than anything, it was the year of Tom DeLonge, the musician turned ufologist who published an ancient astronaut book, launched a UFO research company, was crowned UFO researcher of the year, and took credit for the year’s biggest UFO research flap. Let’s look back at what happened over the past twelve months.
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Last night the History channel debuted its new series about the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail, Knightfall, a series designed to capitalize on the momentum generated by the network’s hit series Vikings and its core audience’s fascination with Da Vinci Code conspiracy theories. While critics offered mixed reviews of the series, many complained that the show was either dramatically inert or overly generic. Nevertheless, it is the first entry to build on Vikings to create a multipronged programming strategy designed to turn History into a full-service entertainment destination, where scripted shows provide an entry point for documentary features on the (quasi-) real history behind the story.
Late last week novelist David S. Brody, who is a close colleague of former television personality Scott F. Wolter, posted on his blog what he called new information about the origins of the Old Stone Mill in Newport, Rhode Island, popularly known as the Newport Tower. Brody presented a quotation from Pocasset Wampanoag chief Daryl “Black Eagle” Jamieson, a younger man who has clearly been influenced by modern fringe history claims. Jamieson spoke with the Wolter/Brody wing of fringe history in 2015, and it is on his authority that Brody and Wolter claim that Native Americans have a centuries-old oral history of the medieval Earl Henry Sinclair of Orkney coming to America in the late 1300s. Specifically, here is what Black Eagle had to say in his own words:
Longtime ancient astronaut theorist Erich von Däniken has a new book out this week called The Gods Never Left Us. However, it is being published by New Page Books, which has banned me from receiving review copies, so I am not able to review the book yet. I would be willing to bet, however, that I could completely make up a review based on von Däniken’s past work and no one would ever notice the difference. At the rate he churns them out, there can’t really be that much original material in any given book. This is especially likely since his next new book, Impossible Truths, is due out in January. The only thing special about The Gods Never Left Us is that it is being marketed as a direct sequel to Chariots of the Gods. And here, silly me, I thought his previous three dozen books on the same theme were sequels. The book description is unintentionally hilarious: “Can’t they leave us alone? And what makes it so difficult for us to acknowledge the existence of these extraterrestrials? That is what this book deals with.” Yes, why can’t they seem to leave poor old von Däniken alone? After all, he’s only gotten 34 volumes out of the “mystery.”
Since the last of former television personality Scott Wolter’s TV shows went off the air, I haven’t paid a lot of attention to his musings, mostly because without a cable TV platform, he’s just another cranky voice on the internet with an amateur blog and little to say. That’s probably why it’s taken me two weeks to notice that Wolter appeared on Jimmy Church’s Fade to Black radio program, as he does frequently. I find these appearances to be exhausting because the show is three hours long, and who has that kind of time to listen to someone rant? If I wanted to hear three hours of crankiness and complaint, well, I have an infant son, so I already get enough of that. But now Wolter says he is plotting ten years of new television content, which I suppose means that I should pay at least some attention.
The past season of the Yesterday channel and AHC channel British conspiracy documentary series Forbidden History was the most boring it has yet produced. This year’s topic selection leaned away from the outrageous pseudohistory that had marked the program since its 2013 debut as a sort of British version of America Unearthed. Instead, most of this year’s episodes revolved around twentieth century history, with episodes about Mussolini, Hitler, the Vatican, East European totalitarian governments, etc. The subject matter wasn’t of much interest to me, so I did not review the series when it aired a few weeks ago. I caught an episode on the Knights Templar in rerun this week. It first aired in July, and it exemplifies exactly how a formerly wild and crazy series went wrong
Former television personality Scott F. Wolter might be a “former” TV host no more. Wolter made an appearance with Freemason and esoteric practitioner John Logan Parsons III on a podcast devoted to modern Templarism, which he linked on his Twitter account, and during the podcast he said he is in talks for a new TV series about—what else?—the Knights Templar. The podcast is a production of the so-called Templar Collegia, an apparently small esoteric organization in San Francisco that is under the jurisdiction of what it calls the Order of the Temple of Secret Initiates, a group run by Timothy W. Hogan, an alchemist and mystic who bills himself as “the grandmaster of the Knights Templar,” according to the Templar Collegia Facebook page. Wolter, who recently joined the Masons, said that he is now involved with Masonic Templarism and participates in “esoteric retreats” with Hogan to “share knowledge.”
Classicist Claims White Marble Statues Lead to Racism; Plus: Scott Wolter Refines His Templar Claims7/26/2017 Last week Vice News ran a segment about ancient statues and racism in which the HBO program discussed a controversy that arose when Classicist Sarah Bond published an essay in Forbes this past spring, and another in Hyperallergic, describing the fact that Greco-Roman statues were once brightly painted and not stark white as they currently appear now that the paint has rubbed off thanks to the ravages of time.
So this is what it has come to. A NASA spokesman officially denied this week that it is running a child slave colony on Mars after a guest on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Info Wars program made the assertion. The denial made national headlines because Pres. Donald Trump is known to watch, and apparently trust, Jones’s program. On the broadcast, Robert David Steele made the accusation and alleged that global elites use pedophilia as a gateway toward what is essentially vampirism under a pseudoscientific gloss, with their fear hormones used to keep the wealthy forever young.
Here is an interesting fact I found in researching Hermes Trismegistus and his pyramids of wisdom. An old Arabic text by Ibn Wahshiyya called Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham (Ancient Alphabets) (c. 863-930 CE), a book purporting to decipher the hieroglyphs of Egypt, makes reference to a creature named Bahumed, which some have claimed to be the same as Baphomet, the demon allegedly worshiped by the Knights Templar. According to Washiyya, Bahumed was “the most sublime secret” and “the secret of secrets,” “the beginning and return of everything.” The secret of Bahumed, he said, was known to the Hermetic occultists, and it was the secret of the hieroglyphs, encoded in inscriptions which unlock secret magic so powerful that none but the Hermetic followers know of it. This secret knowledge was attributed to Hermes, who was Enoch and Idris, and to his ancestors Seth and Adam, as was typical in Islamic lore.
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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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