Blog Archives

British Investigator Claims Victorian Lapel Pin Is Secret Templar Treasure Map

2/15/2018

If you made a world-changing discovery that could prove that all of history was wrong, how would you present it to the world? Would you hold a news conference to outline the evidence? Publish a journal article for peer review with all of the data needed to understand the claim? Or would you create a nine-minute CGI video that you then ambiguously market to a “global Templar audience” as a strange hybrid of fact and fiction “based on a true story”? Obviously, you’d do the last of these because if you believe that you have completely rewritten history, chances are pretty good that you don’t know enough about evidence and logic and reason to know why you are wrong.

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Review of "Ancient Giants: History, Myth, and Scientific Evidence from Around the World" by Xaviant Haze

2/14/2018

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OK, so here we go again. There is yet another new book about the lost race of giants, and it’s… wait for it… more of the same. Regular readers will remember Xaviant Haze, a DJ and “giant” researcher who has expressed anti-Semitic views about the Rothschilds. Well, Inner Traditions, a company that has never met a bigot or lunatic they wouldn’t give a book deal to, is proudly publishing his new opus, Ancient Giants: History, Myth, and Scientific Evidence from around the World through their Bear & Company imprint. The book, a semi-sequel to his 2016 volume Ancient Giants in the Americas, is due out in June, and this is an early review.

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Fringe Writer Claims Spectacular Bronze Age Gem Is Secret Astrological Image

2/13/2018

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David Warner Mathisen is a one trick pony, a self-described “star myth investigator” who reads basically every story in world mythology and religion as a description of astronomical movements. He was inspired by Hamlet’s Mill, the complex and dense but ultimately self-referential fantasy concocted by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend to argue for the existence of a lost civilization based on the flawed assumption that only an advanced civilization could have gazed up at the sky and told stories about the stars they saw there. Mathisen’s schtick, which he has been promoting since he started selling books on the subject back in 2015, is predictable, but his attempt to tie his hobbyhorse to the spectacular Bronze age gemstone that made headlines last year is bizarre even by his standards.

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Review of "Buried: Knights Templar and the Holy Grail" (Complete Season)

2/10/2018

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In October of last year, A+E Networks filed a trademark application asking for priority consideration for their use of the clunky name Buried: Knights Templar and the Holy Grail for a new television series. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office moved with exceptional speed to grant A+E the use of the name, which they slapped on a program that began airing last week on the History channel as part of the network’s massive push to spread Templar-themed content across its television properties. This included the Knightfall drama series about the Templars, and a refocusing of Curse of Oak Island on fictitious Templar mysteries. All of this is part of what the channel’s head of programming described last year as an intentional push for Templar programming because of audience demand for it

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A Few Thoughts on "Channel Zero: Butcher's Block"

2/9/2018

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This week Syfy debuted the third season of its Channel Zero anthology, entitled “Butcher’s Block.” This is not really a review since I have not seen enough episodes to form a final opinion, but I am apparently in the minority in that I watched the season premiere and felt it to be little more than a random mishmash of horror clichés held together by confusion masquerading as intrigue. But virtually every critic that saw the series gave it a glowing review. Rotten Tomatoes, as of this writing, gave it both a 100% fresh rating from professional critics and the popular audience alike. Granted, the reasons for that have little to do with the show’s quality. The critics surveyed numbered six, all of whom are horror aficionados, a group notorious for praising anything with shadows and blood; and the popular audience also numbered six, a self-selecting group of horror fans.

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The First Effort to Identify Atlantis with the Sea Peoples

2/8/2018

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It turns out that I won’t be on In Search Of to talk about Atlantis after all. I spoke with a segment producer who informed me that the program’s director is an Oscar-nominated auteur with an uncompromising artistic vision for the program. Consequently, they will not accept as a talking head anyone who is unwilling to travel to Europe or a location somewhere in the United States to be filmed according to his exacting creative standards—on a date to be determined at the last minute, depending on the shooting schedule of Zachary Quinto, who will be squeezing the series in between movies. I offered to shoot talking head segments locally here in Albany, using a freelance crew as many shows typically arrange for, since I am not able to leave my infant son or my job behind on a whim, but the auteur said that any shoot where he has less than 100% creative control is unacceptable.

So, you heard it here first: This is the first time I’ve ever been rejected from a series for aesthetic reasons!

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New Scientific Paper Offers Evidence for Younger Dryas Conflagration; Lost Civilization Believers Immediately Lay Claim to Findings

2/7/2018

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[Update: This evening Graham Hancock announced that John Anthony West has died. "He beat the cancer, but the fight took too much out of him and he has moved on now, with great dignity and style, to his next great adventure. I love him, I admire him and I consider him to be a great light in the world that has by no means gone out."] According to the Daily Grail, alternative archaeologist John Anthony West, 85, will be taken off a ventilator tomorrow when he is moved to hospice care. West had been in declining health for more than a year after forgoing conventional cancer treatments in favor of untested alternative care. West, who worked as a tour guide in Egypt for many years, came to prominence 25 years ago when his book reprising some of the claims made by occultist Schwaller de Lubicz about the age of the Great Sphinx earned him a slot on NBC’s 1993 documentary The Mystery of the Sphinx. While West made few original contributions to historiography, his passion for the subject helped to popularize a particular vision of ancient Egypt as the receptacle of wisdom from a lost civilization such as Atlantis.

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Greek Scientists Claim Plutarch Recorded Ancient Greek Voyages to Canadian Colony

2/6/2018

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I read an interesting article about some bad research published recently in the Journal of Coastal Studies claiming that the ancient Greeks visited North America in the early decades CE, and perhaps as far back as the Bronze Age. It’s a rather textbook example of how cherry picking ancient texts outside of their established context can lead to poor results. I first learned of the claim on Friday in Hakai magazine, but it took me a few days to digest the complex chain of faulty reasoning involved. While the original journal article is locked behind a paywall, the lead researcher posted a copy to Research Gate, so we are fortunate to be able to analyze the actual arguments rather than a media summary of them.

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L. A. Marzulli Holds Live Stream Symposium to Reveal Elongated Skull DNA Results [UPDATED WITH RESULTS]

2/3/2018

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Late yesterday, Nephilim theorist L. A. Marzulli held a live global symposium in Los Angeles in which he and a team of misfits presented the results of DNA tests they conducted on an elongated skull from Paracas, Peru. Yes, regular readers will remember that Marzulli already conducted DNA tests on a similar skull and released them as part of the Watchers DVD line. The difference is that this time he released the results via a four-hour pay-per-view $9.99 online live stream, with a DVD and companion book available for purchase. Probably the best part of the farce was Marzulli’s admission that they put together the whole event and all of the supplementary materials before they even had the DNA results.

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Review of Expedition Unknown S04E06 “Hunt for the Metal Library”

2/2/2018

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In the early 1970s, ancient astronaut theorist Erich von Däniken was riding high on the success of Chariots of the Gods and its sequel Gods from Outer Space (a.k.a. Return to the Stars). He was a regular on the talk show circuit and breathlessly quoted in newspapers and magazines. But he was also running out of ways to top his sensational claims about prehistoric space aliens. Gods from Outer Space didn’t quite have the same impact as Chariots of the Gods, and von Däniken needed something more dramatic to fend off competition from the imitators that sprang up in the wake of Chariots. The drive for a dramatic hook for his new book brought von Däniken to South America.

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