After this week’s flap about the BBC/Animal Planet documentary allegedly about ancient astronauts, I thought it might be a good idea to talk a little bit about primary sources and why they are so important. I was going to begin this piece with a famous quotation from Mark Twain, “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on,” and relate it to the way newspapers worldwide picked up the erroneous Discovery News story without fact-checking. Unfortunately, this quotation is an object lesson in exactly my point about primary sources: Twain never said it; in checking for primary sources, it turns out that the exact quotation was from C. H. Spurgeon, who was reworking still earlier versions tracing back, in different form, to Jonathan Swift in the Examiner: “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”
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On July 29, the National Geographic Channel (“NatGeo”) aired a two-hour documentary about unidentified flying objects entitled The Secret History of UFOs. In late 2011, producers for NatGeo contacted me about appearing on the program as an expert on the ancient astronaut theory. I flew to Washington, D.C. in January of this year to record an interview for the show. NatGeo did not use my interview in the finished program. It produced two versions of the program, one for the U.S. and one for international distribution. The American version contains no discussion of ancient astronauts, while the international version, as represented by my DVD screener, does.
I was very disappointed in this decision, and my disappointment was compounded by the finished product, which was exceedingly mild in its critique of the ancient astronaut theory, almost to the point of uselessness. NatGeo demanded that I sign a confidentiality agreement prior to the interview which granted NatGeo the unlimited right to libel, defame, alter, and otherwise manipulate interview content without legal risk (this is standard for all TV releases) and required me to never divulge anything related to the “Shoot,” which referred specifically to the events of January 16, 2012, except for information publicly available. I will honor that agreement and restrict my comments to what happened before, what actually aired, and some ancient-astronaut-style questions about what might have happened that day. Earlier in the week PZ Myers posted a highly entertaining account of a “debate” he participated in with ancient astronaut theorist Scotty Roberts, an advocate of the belief that that Nephilim, or fallen angels from the Book of Enoch, are in fact extraterrestrial beings. This belief rests, ultimately, on the assumption (without proof) that the gods and demons of ancient myth and legend are aliens, which, in turn, is little more than an attempt to project Arthur C. Clarke’s maxim about advanced technology and magic into the deep past.
Some books become classics while others are unjustly forgotten. The skeptical movement tends not to have a very deep canon, and the most iconic skeptical book is probably Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. But there are many older texts that are just as interesting and important that have fallen by the wayside. One of these is Henry Lee’s 1883 Sea Monsters Unmasked, a lavishly illustrated book produced for that year’s International Fisheries Exhibition in London.
With the publication this month of Nick Redfern's Pyramids and the Pentagon, another in his series of UFO and ancient mystery conspiracy books based on U.S. government documents released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I've decided to examine some of the CIA and NSA files Redfern cites in his many books as important evidence for piecing together the story of government involvement in the exploration of ancient astronauts and other extraterrestrial mysteries. This is the third piece in my series on the U.S. government's FOIA files.
Government UFO files are fun, but context is important. Somebody must have been having a laugh back in 1965 when writing the opening paragraph to a nearly-illegible report on a UFO in the Republic of Congo; at any rate, the NSA thought so little of the report that they let the file rot to the point where many of the words can no longer physically be read. With the publication this month of Nick Redfern's Pyramids and the Pentagon, another in his series of UFO and ancient mystery conspiracy books based on U.S. government documents released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I've decided to examine some of the CIA and NSA files Redfern cites in his many books as important evidence for piecing together the story of government involvement in the exploration of ancient astronauts and other extraterrestrial mysteries. This is the second piece in my series on the U.S. government's FOIA files.
The alleged dinosaur living in the Congo Basin, Mokèlé-mbèmbé, has appeared widely in popular culture, thanks in large part to early twentieth century writers who reported Congolese folklore about the creature. The earliest report for the supposed monster is almost universally claimed to be a passage in a 1776 book by the Abbé Proyart (1743-1808), a French cleric and writer later executed for writing the wrong thing about Louis XVI during the reign of Napoleon. Proyart served as a missionary in the Congo Basin in the 1760s, and in an early chapter of his book on the region, Histoire de Loango, Kakongo, et autres royaumes d’Afrique (an English translation is here), he describes the animals of west and central Africa using reports compiled by fellow missionaries in the area.
Digging through some boxes I found my old copy of Gunnar Thompson’s The Friar’s Map of Ancient America (1996), which I bought in 1997 at the gift shop at America’s Stonehenge (Mystery Hill) in New Hampshire—that collection of colonial cold cellars and foundations that generations have passed off as megalithic architecture. The pages are still reasonably white, but the cover has faded from its original electric orange to a dull rust.
The book purports to demonstrate that the world map created by Albertin de Virga (c. 1414) actually depicts North America (as the blob to the northwest of Europe) and South America (as the island southeast of Asia) in the image below. (Note that southern Africa is marked as the site of the Garden of Eden!) The original map vanished into the private hands of an unnamed collector in the 1930s, and all that remains are photographs taken of it shortly before it disappeared. The Scottish physician John Ferriar (1761-1815) was a well-known natural philosopher as well as a critical thinker of wide repute. His 1813 Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions made the case that ghosts were optical illusions. A much earlier paper, "Of Popular Illusions, and Particularly of Medical Demonology," contains much material of interest to the skeptic. In this excerpt, Ferriar discusses the origins of the vampire myth (a topic of great interest in the eighteenth century due to an alleged vampire outbreak in Hungary) by examining a firsthand account of a vampire attack. He applies skeptical reasoning to conclude that a combination of ignorance, fear, and unscrupulous religious practitioners was at fault--a conclusion that is almost undoubtedly right.
In the current Skeptical Inquirer Keith Taylor reviews Richard Dawkins’s new children’s book The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True. In the review, Taylor quotes Dawkins on the origins of pagan mythology. Dawkins relates the story of how Odin created humanity out of tree trunks. The story runs thus in the Prose Edda:
Dawkins writes of this tale:
Since Dawkins feels (correctly) that mythology is prima facie false, he therefore presumes that it must be the result of falsehood and lies. I beg to differ with Dr. Dawkins. I don’t think anyone just “made up” or "came up" with intentional falsehoods. This happened occasionally in very late, literary myths, like that of Cupid and Psyche, but everyone knew those were poetic falsehoods. No, there weren’t ancient con artists sitting around telling people lies to watch them worship false idols for fun.
The very interesting work of David Lewis-Williams in The Mind in the Cave (2002) and Inside the Neolithic Mind (2005, with David Pearce) provide a plausible, evolutionary explanation that requires no con artists, liars, or frauds to explain the origins of myth. Mythic tropes emerged from the experiences of early shamans during altered states of consciousness, brought about by trance or drugs, in which the shaman believed he had visited a supernatural realm and encountered the gods. This realm is actually a product of the evolved neural pathways of the brain and accessible during altered states of consciousness. From these voyages, the shamans developed the kernels of stories about the origin of all things that persisted through time, accumulating gradual changes like in a game of Chinese telephone, where the story evolves without any one actor thinking he or she was responsible for a given change. In other words, we would all benefit from taking Dawkins's own advice in The Magic of Reality and avoid “presuming” anything about the past, since presumptions only reflect back on us our own assumptions and biases. |
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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