Blog Archives

Right-Wing Extremists and a Fetish for the Knights Templar

3/16/2019

An Australian white supremacist carried out the deadliest mass shooting in New Zealand history this week when he murdered 49 people in two mosques in Christchurch. Australian media identified the attacker as personal trainer Brenton Tarrant, who broadcast his rampage live on social media, and police confirmed that he left behind a 74-page manifesto in which he wrote about his hatred of immigrants and non-white peoples, using the language of Neo-Nazism and white supremacy. He spoke of “white genocide,” a common theme among the far right, and one we have seen invoked repeatedly in the racist embrace of the Solutrean Hypothesis among white nationalists.

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Review of Netflix's Supernatural College Drama "The Order"

3/15/2019

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Jake Manley in "The Order" (Netflix)

In the streaming era, TV shows come and go so quickly that there is barely time to binge-watch one before the next drops. Frankly, I don’t know where people find the time to watch 10 or 13 hours of TV in a period of just 24 to 48 hours. Because I don’t have that kind of time, it took me more than a couple of days to make my way through Netflix’s new supernatural comedy-drama, The Order, which touches on many of the themes and leitmotifs that I discuss here on this blog: Gothic horror, Hermetic secret societies, ritual magic, Nephilim, ancient books of wisdom, and the connections between all of these and questions of institutionalized power and privilege. These themes make what would otherwise be a pleasant but forgettable college-set teen drama into something a little more interesting.

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Ibn Khuradadhbeh and the Inscriptions on the Great Pyramid

3/14/2019

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As I have been writing my book about the myths and legends associated with the Giza pyramids, I have run across a few facts I wasn’t previously aware of, or which were right in front of my face but which I didn’t fully understand. One of the more interesting I just discovered by accident this past week. It concerns a passage found in the historian al-Maqrizi’s Al-Khitat, which al-Maqrizi composed around 1400 CE. In the passage he relates what at first seems like a rather standard summary of another writer’s views about the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre:

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Wednesday Roundup: Tom DeLonge to Talk UFOs on History Channel, Harry Reid Spills the Beans on Skinwalker Ranch, and Scott Wolter Says Wrong Things

3/13/2019

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The History Channel announced that it is partnering with UFO enthusiast and former rock star Tom DeLonge for a new docu-series in which the head of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science will explore the Pentagon UFO program instigated by onetime Senate majority leader Harry Reid after Reid became interested in UFOs from talks with billionaire Robert Bigelow and journalist George Knapp. The six-part series will be called Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation and will feature DeLonge interviewing his own employee, former Pentagon UFO investigator Luis Elizondo. Both men, who are paid by To the Stars, will be paid again by the History Channel. “Tom’s curiosity and passion for this subject matter, combined with his team, are the perfect partners to deliver this breakthrough series,” History Channel executive Eli Lehrer said. Lehrer added that the show will differ from other History series in that it will not involve hunting for UFOs but will instead seek to “provoke conversation.”

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Analyzing The Book Trailer for Graham Hancock's "America Before"

3/12/2019

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The Science Channel bumped the next episode of America’s Lost Vikings by a week, perhaps because last week’s episode failed to register in the top 150 cable shows airing last Sunday, so in the meantime, I thought we should take a look at the book trailer that St. Martin’s Press has released for Graham Hancock’s America Before. The trailer is narrated by Hancock himself and offers a series of false and misleading statements designed to create the impression that scientific evidence supports his assertion that a lost civilization was destroyed by a comet that hit North America at the end of the last Ice Age, a notion made famous by Ignatius Donnelly in his Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel.

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Review of "Jesse James and the Lost Templar Treasure" by Daniel J. Duke

3/9/2019

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Generally speaking, if a book opens by thanking God for his help and assistance, it’s not a very good book. Somehow, God’s literary output has declined markedly in quality since his first few bestsellers. Really, after the Qur’an, it was all downhill, even when he is just consulting, as he did with this book. Our inspired volume under consideration today, Jesse James and the Lost Templar Treasure, begins with the unpromising revelation that the author and his mother and sister were disheartened when the James Farm and Museum refused to endorse their family legend that their alleged ancestor, the outlaw Jesse James, faked his death and lived out his life in Blevins, Texas as James Lafayette Courtney—the man who is Daniel J. Duke’s actual ancestor. Our author describes becoming progressively more strident in his beliefs because of the “many rude encounters” he had with experts who declined to embrace his family’s oral tradition that Courtney was James, traditions detailed in his mother Betty Dorsett Duke’s book, Jesse James Lived and Died in Texas, which Duke expects readers to presume to be both true and correct, mostly because the scholarly elites say no.

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Ex-Senator Harry Reid Says He Heard "Rumors" That Someone in Government Knows Something About UFOs

3/8/2019

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In a new interview with Las Vegas TV journalist and UFO culture-warrior George Knapp, former U.S. Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made claims that Russia and China are in a race with the United States to investigate and exploit UFO technology. Knapp frames this as a revelation in an article posted to his TV station’s website, but on closer inspection, it appears that Reid was (a) remarkably incurious about what he now professes to want to see exposed and (b) not really saying anything that hasn’t already been broadcast on Ancient Aliens for everyone in the world to see.

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Graham Hancock Claims Los Angeles Fossils Are Linked to Younger Dryas Comet

3/7/2019

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In a month’s time, Graham Hancock will release his new book, America Before, which attempts to document what he claims to be evidence for a lost civilization that was destroyed when a comet collided with North America at the start of the Younger Dryas period about 12,900 years ago and triggered horrific wildfires that burned much of the continent. Skeptic magazine has commissioned me to review the book, and my review will be published when the book is released in the United States in April. But in the meantime, Hancock tweeted what he said was supporting evidence that his comet holocaust killed off the megafauna of Ice Age America:

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British Tabloid Uses Year-Old Interview with Nephilim Theorist to Claim Atlantis Was Located in the Golan Heights

3/6/2019

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The British Express tabloid recently offered up yet another in the endless list of places where the lost continent of Atlantis is alleged to be. Discussing as though it were new a March 16, 2018 appearance on Coast to Coast AM by Ryan Pitterson, an evangelical Christian Nephilim theorist, the Express quoted Pitterson as saying that Atlantis was located in the Holy Land and that its people were identical with the antediluvian giants fathered by the Sons of God in the sixth chapter of Genesis.

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Review of America's Lost Vikings S01E04 "Ghosts of the Great Lakes"

3/5/2019

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If you tuned in to America’s Lost Vikings S01E04 “Ghosts of the Great Lakes” hoping to see a serious investigation of the controversial Kensington Runestone, a nineteenth century hoax claiming to be a memorial left by Norse and Swedish visitors to Minnesota in the fourteenth century, you were seriously disappointed. If you came to the show expecting to see a discussion of recent conspiracy theories tying the stone to the Knights Templar, the Holy Bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, or cultic land claims to the Mississippi watershed, you were also deeply disappointed. Overall, the show provided a balanced, if not always critical, evaluation of the Kensington Runestone, but it also made rather plain that the truth behind the story—like that of the “Viking” spearpoint in New York last week—is much less important that the fact that these stories can be used as window dressing to draw in American audiences to a show that would otherwise be a bargain-basement effort to cosplay as Vikings.

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