Since I live in the United States, I’m exposed primarily to claims about the alternative history of America, so it’s refreshing to realize that America isn’t the only place where weird ideas about ancient history pop up. In fact, wherever there are white people who have colonized primarily non-white lands, we find alternative histories creating a fictive pre-history for Caucasian colonization. I remember reading ages ago about claims that some graffiti in an Australian cave was proof of ancient Egyptian colonization of Australia, and the white minority government of Rhodesia made white construction of Great Zimbabwe official ideology down to the fall of the regime in 1980. An entire genre has grown up around attempts to “prove” that the gods of South America were in fact a lost white race of civilizers who visited education upon the benighted brown peoples of that continent and ruled them as their Master Race.
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I grew up in upstate New York, an older part of the country whose settlement dates back to the colonial era. Although I lived in the city of Auburn, I spent a great deal of time traveling across upstate New York’s farm country, and I’ve visited plenty of farms whose structures dated back to the early 1800s, and more than a few that had origins in the 1700s. I’ve seen pretty much every type of farm building used in those days, and a goodly number of outbuildings, root cellars, spring houses, powder magazines, and other buildings that were built using the dry stone technique brought over from England.
This is a rather longwinded way of saying that the mysterious “chamber” Scott Wolter investigates in America Unearthed S01E08 “Chamber Hunting” is “mysterious” only to those who’ve never spent much time visiting farms or studying the lives of people who were not part of the cultural, religious, or political elite that Wolter favors. Here’s what Ancient Aliens has been teaching us over the past five seasons:
Now, I don’t know about you, but it sounds to me like these “aliens” are not “flesh and blood extraterrestrials” but rather pagan gods. They have no characteristics that distinguish them from the pagan gods, not even their UFOs, which are nothing more that the chariots that convey Thor and Helios and their ilk. Specifically, the vision of the aliens put forward by the ancient astronaut “theorists” is exactly that of Helena Blavatsky and Theosophy, where the aliens are spirit beings who bestow knowledge and boons on humanity and can speak through psychic communication. In the Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, published in 1893, the Bureau reported on the widespread fabrication of ancient artifacts. Many of these are still the subject of pseudo-scientific "investigation" today, such as on H2's America Unearthed. To help get a sense of how widespread fabrication and fraud were in the Victorian antiquities market, I'm presenting the first section of the Report's chapter on fraud below. It is funny to note that the Smithsonian scholars thought these "controverted pictographs" would be quickly forgotten; little did they know that more than 100 years later, a million people a week would be watching a TV show that pretends that these long-ago frauds are genuine evidence of Pre-Columbian diffusion from the Old World to the New.
In 1838, at Grave Creek mound on the Ohio-West Virginia border, a strange little stone came to light, written in weird characters and apparently of ancient manufacture. Controversy swirled around the stone. Could it be proof that Europeans had colonized early America? The stone certainly jived with the tales of European builders of America’s ancient mounds spun by Caleb Atwater and other proponents of non-Native builders of these earthen monuments, a theory given great weight when adopted by President Andrew Jackson as a justification for the removal of Native Americans from east of the Mississippi River. For, if the mounds were built by white men, Native Americans were not the first owners of the land and could therefore be dispossessed legally as squatters on historically “white” territory.
Did you know that an ancient astronaut theorist was almost president of the United States? It’s true, and, as always, there’s a weird connection to H. P. Lovecraft.
Our story opens in 1944, during World War II, when an ailing President Franklin Roosevelt was running for his fourth term as America’s head of state. For the previous term, Henry A. Wallace had been serving as vice-president of the United States, and he served as the Secretary of Agriculture before that. Wallace recognized that Roosevelt was unlikely to survive his fourth term, and, of course, he wanted to remain on as vice-president with the near-certainty of succeeding to the top job. Party bosses were deeply troubled by the possibility of a Wallace presidency, and they worked behind the scenes to dump Wallace and replace him on the ticket with the more acceptable Harry Truman. What was it that made Wallace unacceptable? Ancient astronauts. Sort of. In an article published Sunday on New Dawn magazine’s website, former Neo-Nazi and convicted sexual molester Frank Joseph reported on a megalithic site I’ve never heard of, Mount Padang on the Indonesian island of Java. According to Joseph, this elaborate ruin composed of large stones carried to the site from an unknown source, is more than 6,500 years old, with an earlier occupation of perhaps 16,000 years ago. Mount Padang, also called Gunung Padang, is a volcanic cone that had been reshaped with terraces in the early centuries CE.
These dates, in turn, suggest to Joseph that the site is related to the lost continent of Mu (which he does not name but deceptively hides under the false claim of “original Hindu monastery source materials,” i.e. Churchward’s non-existent Naacal tablets). It also suggests the existence of Lemuria, as well as any other advanced lost civilization, which in other works Joseph has identified as a forgotten race of white supermen who bequeathed civilization to the benighted dark-skinned peoples of the world. Since I’ve had enough of America Unearthed, I thought I’d briefly share a weird claim I came across yesterday. I read about Roman history in my spare time because I love imperial Rome; I don’t get to talk about it much here, though, since alternative types don’t care much for trying to insert aliens into well-documented periods.
Anyway, I was reading about the fall of the Roman Empire and came across the weird claim that Classical civilization was destroyed by Muslims, a neat trick since the Classical world had faded away at least a century before Islam. In order to make this hypothesis work, John O’Neill claimed that Otto III, Holy Roman Emperor, had added 297 years to the calendar. By removing them, Muslims are suddenly at the gates of the Classical world, threatening Greco-Roman culture, and absolving Christians and barbarians alike of responsibility for the Dark Ages. Since I received some questions about a blog post I made last week, I’ve done some more digging on it and will follow up today. I hope this is the last I will write about America Unearthed for the rest of the week.
Last week I released documents related to the budget for H2’s America Unearthed. Committee Films, the studio behind the series, asserted in those documents that the pilot episode for the series had a budget of $617,000, including $27,000 in pay and other compensation for series star Scott Wolter. Committee requested more than $112,000 in government and private matching funds from Minnesota Film and Television’s Snowbate program for filming the pilot in Minnesota. Over the last few days, I’ve received blog comments and emails accusing me of being “obsessed” with Scott Wolter, the geologist who hosts America Unearthed. I thought it was worth pointing out that I wrote about Wolter just twice (here and here, with a very brief mention here) prior to the launch of America Unearthed. Both times I wrote were part of a larger book review solicited by the publisher, not from my own initiative. My blog has always covered whatever is new and popular in alternative history, and with a million weekly viewers, America Unearthed is the highest rated alternative history program and, for better or worse, is leading the field.
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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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