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Michael Shermer Debated Graham Hancock on "The Joe Rogan Experience." It Did Not Go Well.

5/17/2017

Well, that was unusual, and a little embarrassing. Yesterday afternoon (Pacific time) in his more than three-hour podcast, Joe Rogan hosted skeptic Michael Shermer, amateur geologist Randall Carlson, and journalist Graham Hancock, along with a pair of additional guests in the third hour, to debate Hancock’s claim that a comet destroyed an advanced civilization at the end of the last ice age. Shermer more or less blew it. He spoke above the level of the audience, threw kitchen-sink arguments at Hancock, and, worst of all, focused so heavily on the negative that he came across as a scold. The problem is that he is no expert in archaeology, so he spent more time discussing the burden of proof than the origins and development of Hancock’s claims. He couldn’t quite speak to the awe and wonder of the past; instead, he spoke of academic conferences and the proper way to debate new facts. Even when he tried to speak to the amazing antiquity of Göbekli Tepe, he couldn’t quite match Hancock’s fluidly British debate team polish. Skeptics need spokespeople who can speak with passion.

Shermer was not happy that I found his end of the debate lacking and attacked me on Twitter, and later apologized for what he called a “raw moment”:

I read yr review of @Graham__Hancock 's book @JasonColavito It's so full of ad hominem it's useless. Look in mirror first before slamming me
— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) May 17, 2017

100 Comments

Orbiting the Graham Hancock Universe: "Archaeological Fantasies" Explores Gobekli Tepe and Rebecca Bradley Discusses Gunung Padang

5/16/2017

9 Comments

I’ve had a very busy weekend, and I am a bit overwhelmed with work today. Fortunately, there are two excellent new resources that I’d like to call your attention to. First, you will undoubtedly recall the academic paper that caused a bit of a stir not long ago when some engineers adapted and adopted the Andrew Collins and Graham Hancock view of the ancient Turkish site of Göbekli Tepe (though denying Hancock’s contention of a prophecy of a future impact encoded on the stones) and attempted to argue that carvings on the site represent a recording of the sky, including astrological constellations, as they appeared when a comet hit the earth during the Younger Dryas.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S12E03 "The Mystery of Rudloe Manor"

5/12/2017

55 Comments

Welcome to another one of Ancient Aliens’ increasingly regular forays into modern ufology in place of ancient history. Tonight’s topic, “The Mystery of Rudloe Manor,” looks at the title property, a onetime British country estate that sits atop an old quarry that was used as an RAF bunker and base during World War II. After the war, it continued on as an RAF communications hub, serving as the control center for Skynet, among other functions. It is connected to a large installation two miles away. In the 1990s, Rupert Matthews alleged that the secret operations that occurred at the manor were related to space aliens, thus launching a rumor perpetuated by fringe writers ever since, among them Ancient Aliens’ own Nick Redfern and Nick Pope.

As you might imagine, I don’t really care about this rumor whatsoever, so this episode was a pretty lengthy slog, more so than usual. It seems that this year the show is trying to burn time by going even more slowly and focusing on ever narrower topics. This episode is rather light on talking heads, and in its single topic and Tsoukalos-fronted on-location focus, it is much closer to a lost episode of In Search of Aliens, the short-lived Ancient Aliens spin-off, than a regular episode of the mother ship.

55 Comments

L. A. Marzulli and Gary Stearman Talk UFOs, Praise "Ancient Aliens," and Prepare for the Rapture in New Interview

5/12/2017

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On Wednesday, L. A. Marzulli appeared on Prophecy Watchers to discuss “The Great UFO Deception” as host Gary Stearman calls it, or The Watchman Chronicles, as Marzulli titled the DVD he is hawking. Marzulli was on to discuss the impact of UFOs on Christianity, and he calls the tendency of Christians to see UFOs and lights in the sky “even after” finding Jesus “this dirty little secret in the church that no one talks about.” Marzulli claims that between 5% and 33% of churchgoers have seen UFOs. If these two gentlemen are to be believed, Christians are deeply worried that space aliens are seducing the faithful away from demonology and thus threatening evangelical Christianity.

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In Major New Article, Graham Hancock Repeats Previous Anti-Scientist Claims, Defends the Search for Atlantis

5/11/2017

76 Comments

I will confess that I am not a regular visitor to Graham Hancock’s website, so I am sometimes a few days behind on his latest postings. The last time he wrote an article for his site was in December, and frankly he had sort of fallen off of my radar so that I didn’t realize until now that he published a monumentally long new diatribe on April 30. In the new article, Hancock alleges that scientists “consistently suppress and marginalise new knowledge that conflicts with established positions.” The proximate cause of the article was the appearance of news pieces on the websites of National Geographic and Smithsonian Magazine, which Hancock takes as proof that science is a conspiracy to impose dogma.

76 Comments

Smithsonian Channel Claims Babylonian Tablet Preserves "Exactly What the Tower of Babel Looked Like"

5/10/2017

6 Comments

Sometime in the last couple of weeks the Smithsonian Channel launched the fourth season of its Secrets TV series, and the season premiere focused on the Tower of Babel. Over the past few days both Christian groups and fringe archaeology types have embraced a clip of the program in which a Babylonian tablet is discussed because they believe that the tablet “proves” that the Biblical story is literally true. I was intrigued enough by the tablet to try to find out why the tinfoil hat brigade would think that the tablet demonstrates the reality of a Biblical legend.

6 Comments

France's Top Ethnology Museum Plans to Hold a Discussion about Dinosaurs and Space Aliens in North American Rock Art

5/9/2017

9 Comments

Sixty-two days ago, musician Tom DeLonge announced that he would have a major UFO “disclosure” announcement within sixty days. When the deadline hit on Sunday, DeLonge said that the announcement had been postponed for several weeks. What could be worth the wait? Whatever it is, it certainly isn’t of such pressing importance that DeLonge would place public service over publicity in order to ensure that the public had vital information.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S12E02 "Forged by the Gods"

5/5/2017

37 Comments

Last week’s season premiere of Ancient Aliens opened a bit soft, with only 1.175 million viewers. It’s a little better than last year, when the show dipped below a million viewers for new episodes for the first time, but it’s still far below the show’s peak five or six years ago when around 2 million watched. However, the program has had a remarkable consistency over the past twelve seasons, rarely deviating more than 10% from week to week, an astonishing achievement for a show this late in its run.

This week’s episode, “Forged by the Gods,” examines alien artifacts on Earth. You might remember that years ago, the ancient astronaut theorists claimed that only Puma Punku was physical evidence of alien artifacts on Earth, but now, in need of ratings, they need to find something to sustain interest.

37 Comments

Did Australian Aborigines Preserve a Memory of a Volcanic Eruption for 7,000 Years?

5/5/2017

16 Comments

The Australian edition of National Geographic carries a rather grandiose claim that an Aboriginal tribe in Australia accurately preserved the memory of the eruption of a local volcano for 230 generations spanning 7,000 years. This article is one of dozens that appeared in Australian and British media in the last few days after the University of Glasgow issued a press release on the subject last Friday. It would be wonderful if this were true, but the article left me feeling uneasy, not least because the story in question was first recorded in 1970, some 6,900+ years after the fact, and long after most members of the Gugu Badhun would have been familiar enough with volcanism that Western education could conceivably have influenced any story told at that time. Indeed, by 1970, the Gugu Badhun language was dying, and a linguist studying them at the time found no fluent speakers of the language and only a dozen or so partial speakers.

16 Comments

An Early Argument that Cro-Magnons Were the Nephilim

5/4/2017

14 Comments

Yesterday I discussed a strange claim that the Nephilim were actually the woolly mammoths of the Ice Age. Today I’d like to take a look at a slightly different claim that tried to tie the Nephilim to the Ice Age. Our piece today comes from The Presbyterian Quarterly in 1895, and it concerns what was then the controversial discovery of Neanderthals. Religious types had some difficulty trying to understand where the Neanderthal would fall in the biblical framework, and they feared that it would provide too much support for the idea of evolution.

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Michael Shermer Debated Graham Hancock on "The Joe Rogan Experience." It Did Not Go Well.

Orbiting the Graham Hancock Universe: "Archaeological Fantasies" Explores Gobekli Tepe and Rebecca Bradley Discusses Gunung Padang

Review of Ancient Aliens S12E03 "The Mystery of Rudloe Manor"

L. A. Marzulli and Gary Stearman Talk UFOs, Praise "Ancient Aliens," and Prepare for the Rapture in New Interview

In Major New Article, Graham Hancock Repeats Previous Anti-Scientist Claims, Defends the Search for Atlantis

Smithsonian Channel Claims Babylonian Tablet Preserves "Exactly What the Tower of Babel Looked Like"

France's Top Ethnology Museum Plans to Hold a Discussion about Dinosaurs and Space Aliens in North American Rock Art

Review of Ancient Aliens S12E02 "Forged by the Gods"

Did Australian Aborigines Preserve a Memory of a Volcanic Eruption for 7,000 Years?

An Early Argument that Cro-Magnons Were the Nephilim

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