Blog Archives

Matt Sibson Claims Lost Egyptian Sacred Book Holds Secret of the Pyramids

3/30/2019

As a reminder, for the next week, I am reducing my blog output as I work on reviewing Graham Hancock’s America Before.

Last week, The Daily Star, ran a piece (picked up within hours by Sputnik) about ancient Egypt alleging that a lost book contains all of the secrets of the pyramids. The claim comes from Matt Sibson, the blogger and YouTuber whom we met last year when he alleged that the hoax Zeno map was actually an antediluvian chart of Atlantis. In his latest brain dropping, he misunderstood his sources and mangled yet another effort to understand ancient history, this time the Great Pyramid of Giza:

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History Channel Doubles Down on Paranormal and Conspiracy Programming in Presentation to Advertisers

3/29/2019

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At the A+E Networks upfront presentation to advertisers this week, the History Channel announced that it is doubling down on pseudohistory with a major expansion of its paranormal and conspiracy theory programming. At the presentation, History announced the return of Ancient Aliens and In Search Of for additional seasons as well as the addition of The UnXplained (working title), to be hosted by William Shatner. The new program will explore alleged historical mysteries, and it will be the second show on the network to do so with the help of a Star Trek star, since In Search Of features Star Trek movie actor Zachary Quinto as host.

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Atlantis Found Yet Again, This Time at Mt. Girnar in India

3/28/2019

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Ancient Origins published yet another entry in the endless list of places alleged to be the lost continent of Atlantis. Today’s candidate comes from the pen of Italian expatriate E. B. Ralbadisole, who now lives in Asia, claims to worship nature, and said that he became interested in Atlantis after receiving a supernatural vision of a lost Ice Age civilization. He places the fictitious lost city in the Kathiawar peninsula, in western India, specifically atop Mt. Girnar, and alleges that Atlantis did not sink into the ocean but was buried in a giant mudslide that inspired the Biblical Flood. Really.

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New Journal Article Concludes Cerutti Mastodon Bones Broken Recently by Construction Equipment, Not Hunters 130,000 Years Ago

3/27/2019

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On Tuesday, Graham Hancock will launch his new book, America Before, in which the alternative history author will claim that human beings have been in the Americas for 130,000 years—a claim he says “rewrites prehistory.” He will base this claim on the so-called Cerutti Mastodon. In 2017, a report in Nature alleged that the bones, found near San Diego, showed evidence that they had been intentionally butchered with stone tools, implying that an unknown human species was responsible. However, after the claim received widespread media coverage and featured as evidence that “history” as we know it is wrong in both Legends of the Lost and America Before, a new paper published a few days ago in PaleoAmerica entitled “The Cerutti Mastodon Site Reconsidered with Reference to Freeway Construction Plans and Methods” concludes that the “evidence” for human butchering is in fact nothing more than damage done during road construction at the site.

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Review of America's Lost Vikings S01E06 "The Alaska Enigma"

3/25/2019

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If you can believe it, we made it!

After five fairly pointless outings of America’s Lost Vikings, we have finally come to the sixth and final episode of this misbegotten series, the misnamed “The Alaska Enigma.” I have relatively little stay about this episode except that until its final few minutes, it was distinctly out of character for the series in that it did not involve Vikings or the United States. The topic was almost wholly unconnected to Viking expeditions to Vinland, and it had nothing to do with the search for Vikings in the continental U.S. Indeed, if the episode’s conclusions are correct, it would seemingly contradict much of what the series had attempted to use cutting-edge speculation to fantasize.

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"Alien Autopsy" Producer Sues UFO "Contactee," Former CIA Scientist, and Ex-Congressman Over Stalled UFO Documentary

3/23/2019

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Last year, I was contacted by Robert Kiviat, who introduced himself as the producer behind the infamous Alien Autopsy Fox-TV special from the 1990s and Unsolved Mysteries. He also produced infamous specials like Aliens on the Moon and UFOs: The Best Evidence Ever Caught on Tape. He had read my blog posts concerning To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and inquired whether I would be willing to appear in a documentary he was planning to produce for an unnamed broadcast television network that would attempt to undercut many of the claims made by To the Stars and its team, particularly ESP-researcher turn interdimensional UFO investigator Hal Puthoff, while still endorsing the reality of the UFO phenomenon that To the Stars investigated

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Slate Magazine Blasts "The Joe Rogan Experience" for Selling Pseudo-Enlightenment to Angry White Men

3/22/2019

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Yesterday, Slate magazine ran a lengthy feature analyzing The Joe Rogan Experience, which regular readers will know as a major vector in the spread of pseudohistory and conspiracy theories. The podcast, hosted by comedian Joe Rogan, routinely plays host to provocateurs like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, and it has also featured stalwarts of the so-called “alternative history” movement, including Graham Hancock and Robert Schoch. In the article, Slate’s Justin Peters takes all of these disparate characters as part of a loose but thematically connected network of “grifters” and hucksters who are selling a worldview aimed at passing off white male hegemony as an intellectually adventurous form of enlightenment. To that end, Peters sees Rogan as trafficking in lies to the benefit of an aggrieved audience of mostly white men who espouse reactionary political views even as they profess to be open-minded, tolerant, and liberal.

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Dinosaurs, Lost Civilizations, and the Erasure of Central African Culture

3/21/2019

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Instead of writing a lengthy blog post today, I’d like to recommend that you read “Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa,” an excellent article in Contingent Magazine by Edward Guimont discussing the close connection between pseudohistory, cryptozoology, and colonialism in Central Africa from early colonial era down to the present. Guimont discusses how Europeans attempted to assert control over Africa by rewriting its history through a Biblical lens but also through appropriating control over its animals. As Guimont explains, such seemingly disparate phenomena as hunting for King Solomon’s mines, looking for dinosaurs in the Congo, and displaying African wildlife in European capitals were actually part of a single colonial enterprise to delegitimize African cultures and knowledge and assert European dominance. To this end, the entire language of “discovery” and “exploration” inherently referred to European penetration of lands viewed as inherently wild and primitive, whose inferior peoples were ignorant and whose presence and knowledge were unacknowledged and unvalued.

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Imagining Space Aliens as Supernatural Versions of the 1 Percent

3/20/2019

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When D. W. Pasulka published American Cosmic earlier this year, not much came of it. Her book provided a portrait of UFO belief among a small group of scientists and government contractors, and it received the most publicity for a passage in which Pasulka reported on the results of tests a supposed alien artifact that believers said had unearthly properties. In a review of the book published on The Outline this week, writer Clare Coffey picks up on the book’s most important theme, that UFO belief has become a secular religion, and Coffey analyzes what it means that this quasi-religious belief has invaded the halls of American power where a small but influential minority of officials profess to believe in extraterrestrial creatures that act with basically demonic power.

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Review of America's Lost Vikings S01E05 "Curse of Death Island"

3/19/2019

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From the time of the Romans through the Middle Ages, any legendary paradise worth its salt had to have wild grapes growing freely. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (6.37) said as much about the Fortunate Islands, as did Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies (14.6.8) and Rabanus Maurus in De universo (12.5). The Voyage of St. Brendan, from around 900 CE, reports that the legendary monk discovered a paradisiacal island covered in grapes on his fictitious voyage across the Atlantic. It was therefore no wonder that when the Vikings told the story of Vinland, the same people who proclaimed the icy Greenland to be lush and green also used the language of paradise to describe what is believed to be the mainland of the United States. The oldest reference comes from Adam of Bremen, written around 1075 CE. “Vines grow there naturally, producing the best of wines. That unsown fruits grow there in abundance we have ascertained not from fabulous reports but from the trustworthy relations of the Danes” (Gesta Hammaburgensis 4.38, my trans.).

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