It’s hard to believe that the third season of Forbidden History has already come and gone. However, with just six episodes in the season, time really does fly by. It’s not the most interesting show, a sort of knockoff-cum-homage to America Unearthed and Ancient Aliens staffed entirely by junior varsity wannabees, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had a fringe history TV series to review, and I need to keep my reviewing muscles worked out for the upcoming return of Ancient Aliens next month.
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Saturday Roundup: Nephilim Mating Habits, Stone Spheres in Bosnia, and the Band of Holes in Peru4/9/2016 I have three brief news stories to share today, all of which are interesting in their own right but none of which was long enough for me to turn into a full blog post on its own.
I must confess that I have never heard of Nik Turner, a musician from the space rock band Hawkwind, and to be entirely honest, I’ve never heard of “space rock” either. Apparently there was a 1970s subgenre of rock that used musical beats borrowed from science fiction movie scores and wrote lyrics about outer space. It seems that over the intervening decades Turner’s views on the cosmos have curdled some, and he now says he’s working on a new album that will evangelize Zecharia Sitchin’s version of the ancient astronaut theory. Turner recently told The Quietus I’m also working on an album with Helios Creed about the origins of humanity and the Anunnaki and the planet Nibiru. How the Annunaki are supposed to have seeded humanity upon the Earth in order for humanity to serve them in the goldmines, which is what they were interested in having from the Earth. I think the Toltecs and the Olmecs and the Nephilim were all giants, from that planet that’s behind Pluto that’s supposed to be the twelfth planet of the solar system. Nick Redfern and Micah Hanks Publish Articles Saying They No Longer Think UFOs Are Alien Spacecraft4/7/2016 Back in 2013, I published an article in the journal Paranthropology in which I discussed how the UFO phenomenon, such as it is, has the hallmarks of a modern mythology in that the so-called phenomenon exists primary because “investigators” have forced a narrative onto events that can be better explained in other ways. As I wrote at the time, the various parts of the UFO myth, such as sightings of lights in the sky, encounters with strange creatures, and sexual experimentation, had historically been considered separate and only merged together in the middle twentieth century. These facts have been weighing on the minds of Nick Redfern and Micah Hanks, both of whom published articles in the last 24 hours moving themselves about two-thirds of the way toward my position. They aren’t there yet, though: Both sill think that something paranormal is going on
Scott Wolter appeared on the Jimmy Church radio show Fade to Black for three rambling hours on Monday night to talk about how his fans are happy that he’s been proved right about Vikings in America due to the discovery of a new potentially Viking site in Newfoundland. “So many of these know-it-all academic types,” he said, “get it handed to them” when a site like that is found, challenging their dogmatic belief that the Vikings weren’t in America. Wolter believes that the Vikings likely visited Cape Cod and thinks the evidence will be found soon. Church, for example, concurs that the skeptics and academics don’t want to admit a Viking presence in America. I’m not sure who these skeptics are since, as I have documented, Viking incursions in America have been widely accepted as true since the 1830s.
The other day I mentioned that a second potential Norse site had been discovered in Newfoundland, and in the ensuing comments I mentioned that using the Icelandic Sagas’ stories of how the Vikings discovered Vinland to locate the area geographically can be problematic because it is difficult to separate the historical truth from the myths and legends that were folded into the stories. To that end, I received an interesting email informing me that some supporters of the veracity of the Sagas claim to have identified the wheat found in the poems as a New World plant, Spartina patens, marsh hay cordgrass.
In the penultimate episode of the third season of Forbidden History, host Jamie Theakston went in search of Satan, in an episode that never quite rises to the level of the infamous Ancient Aliens episode that asked viewers to worship Lucifer as the embodiment of cosmic good. “Inside the Cult of Satan” (S03E05) instead is overly concerned with whether people enjoy sex too much, and if this might threaten Christian morality. To make that case, it tells us that there are more than 100,000 Satanists in the world, a number that is growing according to ghost hunter Richard Felix because of a rejection of puritanical Christianity in search of hedonism. “Hallelujah! Praise the new Lord,” Felix proclaims sarcastically. Heather Osborn, a fringe radio host, engages in moral panic by proclaiming that “dark” television programs are leading teenagers to embrace Satan, with the implication that this is why they are sexually active.
On Friday Chariots of the Gods author Erich von Däniken (hereafter, for my convenience, EVD) appeared on the Grimerica podcast to discuss the ancient astronaut theory. EVD, now age 81, phoned in from a mountain in Switzerland, presumably either his chalet or office in what used to be Mystery Park, and started by telling the story of how he became an ancient astronaut theorist. EVD began by repeating his well-worn story of how he is a devout believer in God but came to doubt the veracity of the Bible in his Catholic youth due to the Biblical Yahweh failing to meet his expectations for a perfect and all-loving deity. EVD left out of the Chariots of the Gods origin story his plagiarism of Morning of the Magicians and other early ancient astronaut texts, and the embezzlement he tried to explain away as stealing money for “research” trips to far-flung tourist traps.
I must be coming up in the world. Over the past few months, I’ve ended up on a number of PR companies’ lists and have been bombarded with requests to review various media projects, and for the first time the PR agents are offering me free review copies of upcoming releases. Yes, I am now a wielder of power and influence on par with your run of the mill Kardashian fan page. As a result, I was given access to the video on demand release of a documentary on UFOs called Strange Septembers: The Hill Abduction & the Exeter Encounter – Narrated by Peter Weller. Yes, Robocop got his name listed as part of the title in the press packet, though not on-screen in the film itself. The film was made in 2010 but is just now being released.
Friday Roundup: Unicorns in Kazakhstan, Vikings in Newfoundland, and Racism in the White City4/1/2016 In the 1962 movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Vance, a reporter tells Jimmy Stewart’s character that he won’t be reporting the truth about the story Stewart told him. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” he says. In many ways storytelling supersedes truth in many ways, and today we have three examples of how the stories people tell create a framework that governs how facts are received.
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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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