Note: This post originally mischaracterized Dave Goudsward's work because I confused it with a different book on New England mysteries released the same year. The post has been edited to correct the errors.
Dave Goudsward, a historian and Lovecraftian writer, will be presenting at the upcoming NecronomiCon in Providence, a paper on Lovecraft and the “Great Altar Stones” of New England, most of which are colonial-era cider presses, but which may have inspired the stones of Sentinel Hill in The Dunwich Horror. The most famous of these rocks is America’s Stonehenge (a.k.a. Mystery Hill), which writers other than Goudsward have linked with Lovecraft. I should probably be a little miffed that the theme of the convention is the intersection of science, pseudoscience, and art in Lovecraft’s Mythos, which is pretty much my thing, and no one invited me!
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I’m feeling a bit lazy today, so I reached back into my archive to pull out this quotation from Ancient Aliens pundit Giorgio Tsoukalos, from a speech he gave last year at the University of New Hampshire, apparently a standard part of his Gods or Ancient Astronauts PowerPoint presentation that he misleadingly claims as his credential for listing himself as an “author.” Anyway, he told the college audience that “professors” were unwilling to investigate ancient astronauts—the standard anti-academic line—before explaining his own formal training in archaeology:
This is not a particularly revelatory piece of trivia, but the story I’m going to tell makes an interesting case study in the methods of alternative historians. In discussing Charlemagne’s UFO legislation yesterday, I came across another medieval passage about a different king that has made the rounds of ancient astronaut and UFO websites and is another instance of fabrication combining with repetition to create a fake historical incident. In Wonders in the Sky, Jacques Vallée asserts that King Stephen of Hungary was lifted bodily into the sky by angels in a flying tent.
In my review of Philip Coppens’s Ancient Alien Question, I noted that Coppens cited a 1670 French Rosicrucian novel as his source for the claim that in the time of Charlemagne aerial ships of aliens regularly trolled the medieval skies, prompting the emperor and his successor to legislate against their activities: “The people straightway believed that sorcerers had taken possession of the Air for the purpose of raising tempests and bringing hail upon their crops. […] The Emperors believed it as well; and this ridiculous chimera went so far that the wise Charlemagne, and after him Louis the Débonnaire, imposed grievous penalties upon all these supposed Tyrants of the Air” (Comte de Gabalis, Discourse V, sec. 127-128).
This week I am reviewing Philip Coppens’s Ancient Alien Question (2011), a book I had intended to review last year before his untimely death. This is the final installment.
CHAPTER SIX At this point in the book, more than halfway through, we finally come to a chapter devoted to “the best evidence” for ancient aliens. I can’t wait. Let’s see what Philip Coppens comes up with. This week I am reviewing Philip Coppens’s Ancient Alien Question (2011), a book I had intended to review last year before his untimely death.
One of the things that has bothered me consistently about Philip Coppens’s work is the great show he makes of providing what in an academic work would be called a “literature review” without any of the real research needed for such a task. He talks a lot about sources and lists book after book whence he derived his potted summaries. But he never, ever engages with the academic literature (or even mainstream popular histories) that he claims to challenge, except for his singular reference (from a long-ago article) to Walter Van Beek; indeed, he seems utterly ignorant of mainstream work except where other authors have made mention of it. All of the books he cites are alternative texts, and it’s clear that his research rarely extended beyond secondary summaries repeated third-hand by other alternative authors. Since Philip Coppens (a.k.a. Filip Coppens) died last year, I’ve been loath to follow through on my original plan from last year to review his book, The Ancient Alien Question (2011). It seemed rather ghoulish to attack the man’s claims in the immediate wake of his sudden passing, and America Unearthed kept me busy during the first quarter of this year. Now that six months or so have passed since Coppens’s death, it seems like I’ve waited long enough to take a closer look at the book that ancient astronaut proponents continue to cite as the most important ancient astronaut book of the past decade.
I’ve often complained that alternative history tends to overemphasize white, male views while ignoring or minimizing the views of the native peoples whose history they appropriate. When it comes to Ancient Aliens, I’ve often noted that they at least seek out opinions from women, African Americans, and Native Americans—even if they are all equally delusional believers in demonstrably untrue ideas. The program’s most frequent black contributor is a creationist, and its most prominent Native American voice—well, he apparently doesn’t believe in aliens per se.
First a couple of odds and ends:
Since we’ve been discussing Einstein and Helena Blavatsky this week thanks to Gary Lachman’s “ironic” discussion of the same, I thought it was worth looking at Theosophy’s claim to have invented Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the famous equation E = mc^2. Boris de Zirkoff made the claim on behalf of his great aunt, Blavatsky, while editing her papers, and he also was the first to suggest that Einstein was a frequent reader of the Theosophical fraud. Over the years this bit of puffery expanded into Leon Maurer’s claim, first presented by (unanswered) letter to the physicist Richard Feynman in 1975, that Einstein derived relativity from The Secret Doctrine.
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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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