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In this month's edition of The SAA Archaeological Record, a publication of the Society for American Archaeology, there is a special section organized by John Hoopes in which a number of authors, including several friends of this blog and me, have pieces examining aspects of Graham Hancock's America Before, pseudoarchaeology, and popular understandings of the past. My piece focuses on racism and the Mound Builder myth, in anticipation of my forthcoming book on the subject. The special edition can be read for free in its entirety here, and my piece also appears on my website by permission of the SAA. In lieu of a lengthy post today, please enjoy my article.
My wrist is still in pain, so I will have a brief post today and then wait until I review Ancient Aliens on Friday to write again so that I can give it some time to heal. (I will have a special brief post Friday morning, so stay tuned.) Today, I’d like to talk a bit about some weird speculation that occurred at the Cucalorus Connect festival at the University of North Carolina Wilmington this past weekend. At the festival, two professors entertained the possibility that we are living inside a computer simulation. So far, so boring. But when it came time for computer science professor Curry Guinn to provide some evidence for the speculation, he first reached for an argument from authority—Elon Musk believes it!—and then turned to the paranormal, according to WRAL.
I managed to injure my wrist shoveling heavy, wet snow yesterday, so it is a little difficult for me to type today. As a result, I am going to (try to) be brief. In Ancient Origins this week, eco-apocalyptic thinker Lucy Wyatt tries to make an argument about why the Knights Templar were interested in the ancient city of Harran, the longtime seat of the Sabians, until rural Muslim militias destroyed their community in the 1030s. Wyatt argues that St. Bernard of Clairvaux and the Knights Templar participated in the Second Crusade in 1145 in order to have a pretext for invading Harran to steal the Sabians’ Hermetic and alchemical secrets, since the Sabians were well-known Hermetic philosophers.
First, the good news: I am so close to finishing Legends of the Pyramids that I want to take the rest of the day to close the books on that project, at least until after the holidays, when the publisher will send me the typeset page proofs to proofread and index. Therefore, I will keep the rest of this entry short. Therefore, our second topic for the day: The hunt for “alien” metal is spreading. It was bad enough that To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science convinced the U.S. Army to help them analyze “Art’s Parts,” but now there is a new piece of alleged Roswell wreckage in the care of a new team of researchers.
Because I am formatting my manuscript this week, I will wait to post a new blog this evening when I review Ancient Aliens.
My deadline for finalizing my Legends of the Pyramids manuscript is December 1, which means that I need to devote extra time over the next two weeks to getting my submission put together. So, today, I will only briefly remark that this year is the centennial of Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned, a seminal work in the world of the bizarre, fringe, and pseudoscientific. In honor of the anniversary, Micah Hanks published an article this week celebrating Fort’s unreadable, gibberish style (“oddly poetic”) and describing “one of my absolute favorite passages” (emphasis in original) in Fort’s book. That he has a favorite passage in Fort, and that it is a list of red rains culminating in a bizarre non sequitur about a “super-dragon” crashing into a comet and bleeding all over the Earth probably says more about Hanks than it does about Fort.
This week, Nephilim hunter and Christian bigot Steve Quayle visited the Evangelical extremist broadcaster SkyWatch.tv to discuss UFOs, cataclysms, and giants, as well as the True Legends conference he held in America’s conservative entertainment capital, Branson, Mo., a few weeks ago. The True Legends conference builds on Quayle’s True Legends brand of Christian Ancient Aliens knockoff products, which like much of the Christian entertainment market involves copying something secular, adding sanctimony and hypocrisy, and reducing the quality by 40-50%. Things got off to a great start when Quayle told viewers that he believes that we live in a holographic universe dominated by demons who have created a “hell-ographic” world, and that UFO disclosure is imminent because Satan is using demon-driven flying saucers to undermine believe in Nephilim giants.
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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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