Nephilim researcher L. A. Marzulli has been making some increasingly disturbing blog posts over the last couple of months in which the conservative Christian has more or less announced his believe that we are living in the End Times and that his quest to find the Nephilim is part of a larger program of preparing his audience for the apocalypse by asking them to give him money. Sorry, that wasn’t quite right. He just happens to be profiting from a wide range of products and services that capitalize on his audience’s belief that Marzulli and the human race won’t be around long enough for Marzulli to make use of the money he’s taking in from their interest in or fear of the Nephilim.
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On Friday Ancient Aliens star Giorgio Tsoukalos appeared on Reddit to discuss the ancient astronaut theory, his hair, and whether he’s insane. (Spoiler alert: He does not think so.) He joked that his towering hair, held together with “lots of hairspray” was “slowly being abducted,” and he also alleged that he saw a UFO at the 2014 Contact in the Desert conference, though he offered no evidence that the lights in the sky were alien spacecraft. His answers were particularly interesting because in this forum Tsoukalos seemed to back off of his alleged conviction that space aliens actually visited humanity in the distant past. Instead, in this forum he spoke primarily of possibilities and seemed to imply that the purpose of the ancient astronaut theory was to generate social change for progressive causes by asking the public to adopt a less parochial perspective.
After seven seasons and six calendar years of Ancient Aliens, it’s a bit hard to get excited about another episode devoted to pyramids. I have a hard time thinking of any pyramids that the show hasn’t yet associated with aliens, and I suppose that’s why this week we’re treated to “Hidden Pyramids,” which tries to freshen a stale subject by proposing that there are thousands of pyramids under the sea, underground, and in other inaccessible places.
As most readers know, I’ve done a massive amount of research into pretty much every permutation of the Watchers myth in an attempt to trace the story from Babylon down to Ancient Aliens. In so doing, my general direction of research has been westward from Babylon to the Holy Land to Egypt and to Europe. It never dawned on me that the same story would also have traveled eastward, into Persia. It makes sense, of course, since Persia abutted and once ruled Mesopotamia, and the version of the Watchers-Pyramid mythology known to the Arab historians would have spread eastward with Islam as easily as it moved westward. This is why it surprised me when I found a version of the story of the pillars of wisdom in a Persian source.
I have to say that I was quite surprised to look at the final Nielsen cable ratings for last Friday, when Ancient Aliens returned to the History channel schedule after three years in exile on H2. I imagine History was shocked as well. According to Nielsen’s published ratings, Ancient Aliens did not rank among the 100 most watched cable shows for Friday April 10. This means that fewer than 300,000 adults between 18 and 49 watched the program on Friday, since 300,000 18-49 demo viewers were the audience for the 100th most popular show. I’m not able to estimate the total number of viewers since Nielsen ranks shows based on 18-49 viewers, not total viewers. In its 9 PM time slot, the program lost big to Discovery’s Bering Sea Gold and reruns of The Cleveland Show and Full House. This is a dramatic fall for a show that brought in 1.5 million viewers (400,000 in the 18-49 demographic) when it aired after Curse of Oak Island in a couple of special presentations over the winter. Can it be that the age of Ancient Aliens is finally drawing to a close? I wouldn’t count on it, but it seems that History’s efforts to rebuilt their Friday night and challenge Discovery’s dominance of the evening among middle aged male viewers didn’t go according to plan.
In the middle of the twentieth century, there were a variety of UFO preachers who tried to marry Christianity and flying saucers with various degrees of success. Many argued that God drove a flying saucer, or that the various miracles of the Bible could be understood as the interventions of space aliens. Others reversed the influence and claimed that space aliens were really demons, or even angels, zipping across the sky in their silvery chariots. Today I’d like to introduce you to Cian Foley, an Irish computer programmer who devotes his off hours to his twin interests in technology and spirituality. It is therefore little surprise that Foley has come to view spirituality as a technological puzzle solvable through appeal to space aliens or otherworldly beings masquerading as space aliens. He has a website called The Jesus Alien in which he advocates a somewhat incoherent mishmash of Christian, New Age, and ancient astronaut beliefs that are a bit unusual.
Graham Hancock has a new book, an edited volume called The Divine Spark (Disinfo, 2015), in which he collects essays advocating the use of hallucinogenic drugs in order to discover true nature of reality. The essays come from some of the usual suspects from both the fringe world and the realm of psychedelics: Robert Schoch, Luis Eduardo Luna, and even English comedian Russell Brand. If the last-mentioned name seems odd, don’t fear: Brand didn’t write a piece for Graham Hancock. Hancock reprints an essay Brand wrote for the New Statesman back in 2011 attacking Richard Dawkins. Anyway, Hancock has posted the introduction to his book in which he muses on the spiritual dimension of reality, which has been the major focus of his “research” into ancient history since he stopped smoking marijuana and took up ayahuasca as his preferred mind-altering substance.
I was overwhelmed with a tsunami of work today, so I ran out of time for writing. I also received a number of emails today from readers who (a) believe I am Scott Wolter and want me to explore and/or promote their local rocks or (b) think I am Giorgio Tsoukalos and want to report on their alien abductions, have him explain their strange prophetic dreams, or buy one of his gold pre-Columbian “airplane” lapel pins. I can’t fathom how anyone can write to me on a website bearing my name and an email address that also features my name and not realize that I am not either Scott Wolter or Giorgio Tsoukalos. Since these emails have ranged into the hundreds over the last three years or so, what does this say about reading comprehension?
This post has been updated with additional information.
On Friday night, Ancient Aliens asserted that due to a head wound suffered in the Civil War the journalist, critic, and author Ambrose Bierce (1842-c. 1913-1914) experienced psychic connections to “otherworldly beings” and used his fiction to promote a supernatural worldview devoted to exploring the reality of interdimensional travel. Worse, they also claimed that Bierce disappeared from Mexico due to his involvement with crystal skulls that allowed him to pass into another dimension. Such claims, if made while Bierce were still alive, would have been close to libelous for a man who was dead set against the supernatural and once tried to evangelize atheism among his coworkers. Worse, Ancient Aliens seems to have concocted the claims by recycling parts of an Indiana Jones movie. One hundred and fifty years ago this week the American Civil War drew to a close. On April 9, 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, and four long years of bloodshed reached their conclusion. The sesquicentennial of this epochal event in U.S. history is worthy of commemoration, and the History channel would seem like the appropriate place to mark such an event. So how is a cable channel devoted to history paying homage to these honored dead? Did they explore, for example, the incomplete peace that followed the war, or the legacy of political and racial tensions left in its wake—something highly relevant given current events? Of course not. They told viewers that space aliens were behind the whole endeavor! It’s the perfect encapsulation of the utter worthlessness of cable television. (If you’re wondering, on April 9 itself they devoted the evening to Pawn Stars, that paragon of scholarly contemplation.)
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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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