Editor's note: This post has been edited to correct a mistake about Lloyd Pye's biography.
Ancient Aliens S06E14 “The Star Children” is a riff on the “Indigo Children” craze from a few years ago, which is a very sad phenomenon by which parents attempted to create rationalizations for their children’s atypical behaviors—ranging from extraordinary intelligence and creativity to autism and hyperactivity—by attributing them to spiritual or genetic advancement, the next phase in evolution. There is, needless to say, no genetic or physical evidence of any otherworldly DNA in these kids.
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And here I was ready to discuss Brien Foerster’s bizarre alien DNA study. Instead, I received dozens of emails this morning alerting me to an angry blog post Scott Wolter made calling for a congressional investigation into the Smithsonian’s suppression of pre-Columbian Old World contact with North America. We’ll get to that in a moment, but first I would like to say a few words about Foerster and alien DNA.
Where was the Garden of Eden? Religious scholars have spent thousands of years looking for the Biblical paradise. Commonly, scholars suggest that any potential real-world model for Eden existed at the head of the Persian Gulf where the Tigris and Euphrates once met the Persian Karun River and the now-vanished Wadi Al-Rummah that once emptied into the Persian Gulf. This would therefore correlate both with the four rivers of Eden described in Genesis as well as the proposed location of the Mesopotamian paradise called Dilmun. However, others have proposed locations ranging from India to Jackson County, Missouri.
Today I’d like to discuss one of the more fanciful suggestions, which attracted a scholarly hearing at the end of the nineteenth century. The eBook for Cthulhu in World Mythology is now live and for sale at Amazon.com, and it will be other outlets soon, with a print edition to follow later in the month. As you get ready to read it, I thought I’d direct your attention to an interesting blog post over at A Few Years in the Absolute Elsewhere. It’s an elegantly written and thought-provoking examination of the connection between H. P. Lovecraft and occultism that I think, ultimately, comes to some incorrect conclusions.
As we count down to the release of Cthulhu in World Mythology, which should be available in the Kindle and Nook stores in the next day or so at the latest, I thought it might be an interesting time to take a look at how the pseudoscience and fringe history of the 1920s influenced H. P. Lovecraft in his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Now on to today’s depressing look into the heart of America Unearthed.
This week’s episode of America Unearthed, S02E10 “Lost Relics of the Bible,” concerns itself, sometimes literally and sometimes thematically, with the Lost Tribes of Israel, who vanished from history following the Assyrian conquest of Israel in 722 BCE. According to myth, all Jews trace their origins back to one of Jacob’s twelve sons, but ten (by tradition) of these groupings disappeared. The Jewish historian Tudor Parfitt—who believed he found the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant among the Lemba tribe in Africa—declared in The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth (2004) that the Lost Tribes were a pious fiction, and one designed to reinforce ethnic and colonialist claims: “...this myth is a vital feature of colonial discourse throughout the long period of European overseas empires, from the beginning of the fifteenth century, until the later half of the twentieth.” And now again today.
And so we begin our quest for Lost Tribes and other wandering Jews, but to understand why anyone would think God’s Chosen People were hiding out in America, we have to trace the European and later American efforts to create an acceptable history for the Americas. Ancient Aliens S06E13 “Aliens in America” covers familiar territory for everyone who reads this blog regularly. I have previously discussed the Smithsonian conspiracy covered in this episode in a separate blog post as well as the background material to my review of the episode of America Unearthed that covered the same imaginary conspiracy. What must viewers of H2 think when multiple shows tell them that the Smithsonian is engaged in a conspiracy to suppress the truth?
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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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