Blog Archives

U.K. History Channel Sparks Outrage, Ridicule with Heavily White Male Promo Video

5/30/2020

Due to prior commitments yesterday and this weekend, I don’t have time for a full-length post today. However, I wanted to share this promotional video for the British affiliate of the History Channel, which is being relaunched this week as Sky History. The rebranding coincides with the channel’s move toward more original U.K. programming and less imported programming from the U.S. channel. Sky History is a joint venture of the U.K.’s Sky and America’s A+E Networks, the parent of the History Channel here. A+E programs and operates the channel. The video offers a sizzle reel of History’s best (worst?) programming and something struck British viewers…

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Janet Wolter and Alan Butler Make False Claims about Templars, Pyramids, Gothic Architecture, and More in Podcast Interview

5/29/2020

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Not long ago, The Freemasons podcast interviewed former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter at length and ended with a promise to give his wife a platform to expand on her goddess-tinged vision of ancient America. So now we have a 90-minute podcast featuring Janet Wolter and her writing partner Alan Butler—the guy who once wrote that moon had been built by time-travelers from the future—in which the pair expound on their book America: Nation of the Goddess, with very little that isn’t already in the book. You can read my review here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. I feel like I should say something about the podcast, but it’s hard to find much new to say about the dull repetition of years-old, debunked claims. Therefore, I’ll focus on the material that isn’t quite so familiar.

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"Forbidden History" Has Low Ratings but Outdraws More Prominent Sunday Shows

5/28/2020

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Sorry, but I have nothing for you today. It’s a slow week. It’s also unseasonably hot, and I just don’t have the energy to forage for something to write about today. I will note briefly that last week’s episode of Forbidden History drew just 370,000 live plus same day viewers for the Science Channel, which sounds awful until you realize that on the same night, HBO’s heavily publicized Mark Ruffalo vehicle I know This Much Is True had 314,000 viewers and the same network’s Run had 211,000 viewers. The even more heavily hyped Penny Dreadful: City of Angels on Showtime had only 369,000 viewers. (The numbers rise when factoring in streaming views and DVR replays later in the week.) Yes, more people watch Forbidden History live than high-profile premium cable dramas. And yet the HBO shows get acres of press coverage, and almost literally no one but me discussed the propaganda passing as “history.”

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Review of "Control Z" (Netflix)

5/27/2020

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I rarely have any idea what a Netflix series is going to be before I watch it, and that’s doubly true for the international series, which rarely arrive with marketing. Not long ago, I watched a show called White Lines, a British-Spanish co-production set on the resort island of Ibiza. I knew nothing about the show other than its Spanish origin and that it was a mystery of some kind. I kind of wish I hadn’t watched it. The series tells the story of a mentally fragile woman who travels to Ibiza to unravel the mystery of her beloved brother’s disappearance 22 years earlier after his body turns up in the present day. The investigation borders on the preposterous, and by the time I got the scene where our unbalanced heroine is having mind-blowing sex with a murderer in the rain on top of the muddy grave they just dug for the men he murdered, I wondered what I was watching. That was before the nauseating incest subplot came to an utterly bonkers conclusion.

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Review of Forbidden History S06E08: “The Vatican’s Book of Secrets”

5/26/2020

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The episode guide I consulted may have said that there were only seven episodes in this season of Forbidden History, but it turns out that more new episodes are still airing. So we’re stuck with it. As the show ages, it struggles to find new content, much like its current model, Ancient Aliens. Thus, the series has done multiple episodes on the Holy Grail, Hitler, etc. This episode, “The Vatican’s Book of Secrets,” is something of a sequel to season 4’s “The Secrets of the Vatican Archives,” moving from ancient conspiracies to more modern ones, albeit with more than a little overlap. Truth be told, none of this is very different from the anti-Catholic conspiracy theories that have swirled around the Roman church since the Protestant Reformation. Paranoid anti-papists think the Catholics are possessed of sinister secrets, other than the child molestation.

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Journalist Describes Father's Path from "Ancient Aliens" to Q-Anon Obsession

5/23/2020

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On the Narratively website, California college student and journalist Reed Ryley Grable provided a poignant and thought account of his father’s gradual slide into Q-Anon conspiracy madness. Grable describes his father’s growing paranoia and social isolation, and he talks eloquently about how his father’s strident conspiracy theory advocacy has alienated him from his family and his friends. While I am not particularly interested in Q-Anon conspiracies, I was neither shocked nor surprised to read Grable’s account of how Ancient Aliens served as a gateway drug leading his father from a nebulous interest in the mysterious and the bizarre to a raving world of online conspiracies.

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In New Interview, Leslie Kean Talks UFOs, Other Dimensions, and the Paranormal

5/22/2020

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A few days ago, Scientific American ran a lengthy interview with Leslie Kean, the journalist and one-time government lobbyist for UFO disclosure. Kean wrote a credulous book about UFOs several years ago but is today best known for a series of New York Times stories in which she outlined the Pentagon’s UFO research program and followed the work of Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a company she had previously discussed in worshipful terms in the Huffington Post. Kean presents herself as an objective journalist investigating extremes, though it is obvious to anyone who has listened to her interviews that she is no neutral observer. Her most recent interview offers more confirmation that many of the interpretations she offers are not fully connected to a dispassionate analysis of facts.

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A New (to Me) Medieval Legend of the Giza Pyramids

5/21/2020

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The other day, when I reviewed Forbidden History’s episode on Noah’s Ark, I found something really interesting by accident while researching the show’s stupid claims. I ended up discovering a medieval legend of the Giza pyramids I had never seen before! So, something good came out of this bad show, albeit in a roundabout way.

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Review of Forbidden History S06E07: "Hitler's Occult Conspiracy"

5/20/2020

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If you can believe it, this is my 3,000th blog post. What better way to mark this milestone than with an episode of a cable TV pseudohistory show featuring ancient astronauts, lost civilizations, Nephilim, the occult, and glowing descriptions of Nazis? It’s everything we have criticized and debunked over the past ten years in capsule form.

“For the Nazis, the occult was like oxygen,” pseudohistorical gasbag Andrew Gough intones at the beginning of the season finale of Forbidden History. Occult conspiracy theorist Lynn Picknett excuses the entire political process of systemic failure in Depression-era Germany by adding that the Nazification of Germany wasn’t the result of human failings but was an “occult process” that turned men into monsters. This isn’t true, of course: People are capable for becoming evil on their own, as soon as they no longer recognize other people as fully human and can justify hate and killing. We don’t want to believe that, though. We want to imagine that human evil isn’t their fault, or ours, so we imagine demons and aliens to take the blame. That is fairly common in fringe history circles, but what is less common is the almost lustful way Forbidden History worships that dark power as but a step removed from communion with the divine.

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Review of Forbidden History S06E05: "Search for Noah's Ark"

5/19/2020

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Since I was able to obtain episodes of the current season of Forbidden History, which airs on a channel not included in my cable package, I am going to devote some of this week to picking up on reviews of episodes I haven’t seen yet. Today I plan to review the May 3 episode investigating Noah’s Ark. The search for the Ark that saved life from the Flood is older than the Abrahamic faiths. According to the most ancient authorities, the peoples of Mesopotamia believed that the Ark used by the Mesopotamian flood-hero (variously Atrahasis, Ziusudra, Xisuthros, Utnapishtim, etc.) had come to rest on a mountain and could still be seen in historic times. They wrote that there had been an active trade in wood from the Ark, which was collected to be used in magical amulets. This belief carried over into Jewish and Christian practice, and it inspired the hunt for Noah’s Ark. Forbidden History sees it a bit differently.

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<<Previous

U.K. History Channel Sparks Outrage, Ridicule with Heavily White Male Promo Video

Janet Wolter and Alan Butler Make False Claims about Templars, Pyramids, Gothic Architecture, and More in Podcast Interview

"Forbidden History" Has Low Ratings but Outdraws More Prominent Sunday Shows

Review of "Control Z" (Netflix)

Review of Forbidden History S06E08: “The Vatican’s Book of Secrets”

Journalist Describes Father's Path from "Ancient Aliens" to Q-Anon Obsession

In New Interview, Leslie Kean Talks UFOs, Other Dimensions, and the Paranormal

A New (to Me) Medieval Legend of the Giza Pyramids

Review of Forbidden History S06E07: "Hitler's Occult Conspiracy"

Review of Forbidden History S06E05: "Search for Noah's Ark"

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