I am tentatively planning to collect some of my best blog post from late 2013 through now for a collection of essays similar to my 2013 anthology Faking History. If you have a favorite blog post you think should be included, feel free to let me know. The only stipulation is that I won’t be using book or TV reviews. In theory, someday those will go into another book. I don’t have a timeline on producing the book yet, but the first step is gathering to the material together. I’m looking for around 50 total blog posts, articles, and essays to fill out the volume.
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I have some happy news (I guess) to share: A short story of mine was just published in the Australian flash fiction anthology 100 Lightnings from Paroxysm Press. There is no link to buy it online in America yet. However, since it took more than four years for publisher to lurch from acceptance of the story to publication, I can barely remember what the story was or that it was even going to be published. So check it out… or don’t… I don’t get paid either way!
Idaho Shooter Wanted to Ask Pres. Obama to Fight "Martians" in American and Israeli Governments3/9/2016 A former Marine whom police described as having a history of mental illness shot and wounded a pastor who had recently prayed at a Ted Cruz rally before the shooter flew to Washington in an attempt to deliver documents to the White House. According to news reports, Kyle Odom, 30, believed that prominent U.S. and Israeli officials are secretly Martians, and he demanded that Pres. Obama take stronger action against the Jewish-space alien forces that he felt ruined his life.
Odom identified dozens of members of Congress and the entire Israeli government as space aliens, adding that there were “too many” Israeli Martians to list. Scott Wolter Promises New Kensington Rune Stone Revelation -- After Freemasons Review His Findings!3/8/2016 All of you must be feeling a tingle of anticipation that Scott Wolter has promised “new” Kensington Rune Stone research! In comments on his blog yesterday, Wolter announced that he gave a presentation about his latest, and still unnamed, rune stone discoveries and plans to submit them for review to—wait for it—the Freemasons! That’s right: Now that Wolter has joined the Freemasons, he’s turning to the same group he once accused of a vast conspiracy to suppress the truth to help him “validate” his claims. Holy crap. Here’s how Wolter put it yesterday:
A long time ago, in 1926 to be precise, a man named James Churchward, who fraudulently called himself a colonel, invented a new lost continent called Mu, placed it in the Pacific, and populated it with the castoff detritus of Theosophy’s Atlantis and Augustus Le Plongeon’s Atlantic island of Mu. For him it was a racist paradise, one where “the original white race,” who of course, reigned over all others, the Master Race. In The Lost Continent of Mu he wrote that “The dominant race in the land of Mu was a white race, exceedingly handsome people, with clear white or olive skin, large, soft, dark eyes and straight black hair. Besides this white race, there were other races, people with yellow, brown or black skins. They, however, did not dominate.” According to Churchward, the white race of Mu colonized all the earth, founded all civilizations, and created all ancient monuments. To support this, he quoted the Ramayana and followed Le Plongeon in asserting that the Maya who appear in that epic are the Mexican Maya and therefore that there is an ancient Aryan origin for both.
New Revisionist History Paints America as an Ancient European Dumping Ground for Obese Romans3/6/2016 I received a series of emails this week from a self-described member of the Sinclair family who really wanted me to review his website, which is called Voyage of the Thunder Gods and exposes how Europeans were the true Native Americans. I’m not sure what to make of it, and I can’t quite tell whether it is meant seriously or is kind of an elaborate joke. Sinclair assured me that he is serious, so I suppose I need to take him at his word. All the same, I find it weird that he bases his revisionist history of the world on obesity. It’s certainly a … unique ... claim.
Today I’d like to share a little bit about the European reaction to the discovery of the Mayan city of Palenque at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1786, the Spanish king, Charles III, commissioned an officer named Antonio del Río to excavate a series of stone ruins the local Maya had reported to the Spanish decades earlier. Over the course of five weeks in early 1787 del Río excavated at the site and studied its ruins. He wrote a report in June that remained in the Spanish viceregal archives until 1822, following the Mexican Revolution, when a Dr. McQuy obtained a copy and sold it to a British bookseller, Henry Berthound, who had it translated with its appended analysis by Paul Felix Cabrera. The results were… weird.
Are we running out of fringe ideas? I wonder sometimes since it seems that each new claim is just a boring variation on something written 50, 100, or a 1,000 years ago. It starts to get boring after a while. Over on Graham Hancock’s website, guest writer David Warner Mathisen discusses why he thinks myths and legends are really based on constellations and their movements, but even he freely concedes that he is borrowing the claim from Hamlet’s Mill half a century ago and Robert Taylor 150 years before that. Over at Ancient Origins, Ralph Ellis, inveterate fringe fabricator, makes the same claim in more overwrought format. In both cases, the authors assume that the constellations were known and recognized in their modern forms worldwide and before the Bronze Age, which of course can’t be proved.
I received my McFarland sales report and royalty check this week, and I was pleasantly surprised that the check was larger than last time. But it confirmed to me that there is really no point in writing books, at least if I have any intention of reaching an audience. When I added up all of the lifetime copies I’ve ever sold of all of my books and then generously assumed that ten people read every copy (an unrealistic assumption), I still reach five times more people each week through my website than I have done in ten and a half years of publishing books. Over the course of a month or a year, the multiple becomes stratospheric. Spending time writing books is all but literally the least efficient way of communicating with an audience, or of spreading ideas that have an impact on audiences.
Since Jacques Vallée is busy soliciting funds for his updated edition of Wonders in the Sky, I thought it might be a good time to take a look at his claim to have been a deep and profound investigator of the myths and legends behind the UFO phenomenon. What better place to start than with the story that gave its name to the tile of Vallée’s most famous book, Passport to Magonia (1969). The tale of Magonia is best known from the work of Agobard, an early medieval archbishop of Lyon, who in 815 wrote in his On Hail and Thunder, chapter 2, of an incident when some peasants tried to kill some strangers they accused of being crop-thieves who lived in the sky:
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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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