Over at Graham Hancock’s message board, author of the month Michael MacRae has decided to offer a lengthy “rebuttal” to my criticism of his claim that Odysseus and a band of Mycenaeans circumnavigated the earth in 1600 BCE. You can read my original post, his criticism, and my response in the thread linked here.
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Last week ufologist Jacques Vallée and his writing partner Chris Aubeck appeared at the Inhabited Skies conference in Spain alongside Fortean researchers Theo Paijmans and Nigel Watson to discuss ancient astronauts and modern UFOs. It was an odd look into Vallée’s somewhat ill-informed views on ancient astronauts. At one point during the conference, Vallée tried to answer a question about the Anunnaki and ended up revealing a bit more than I expected. But to understand his answer we have to start at the beginning of his presentation, at about the 1:37:00 mark in the video below.
In medieval times, there were three primary version of the same legend that the Giza pyramid were built before the Flood to preserve scientific knowledge. Al-Maqrizi helpfully summarizes all three in a passage from his Khitat:
Ancient astronauts are everywhere, and apparently they’re now going into the music business. The thrash band High on Fire is about to release their new album Luminiferous, and in anticipation they’ve released their first single from the album, “The Black Plot,” about how prehistoric extraterrestrials have secretly manipulated human history. According to band member Matt Pike, the song is designed to expose audiences to ancient astronaut conspiracies that have been hidden from the public until Ancient Aliens and related media brought them to light.
The only thing harder than finding Bigfoot is finding a date who also believes in Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts, etc. So it was bound to happen sooner or later. We all knew it. Believers in ancient astronauts, Bigfoot, and other fringe topics naturally want to congregate together, and so it became inevitable that someone would start a dating site for fringe believers to help reproduce the species. After all, if ancient astronaut theorist Jason Martell could help to launch J-Date for Jews and Christian Mingle for Christians, surely there would be a market for a dating site for ancient astronaut theorists. But why wasn’t it Martell to do the deed? With his vast portfolio of (very) modestly successful solo web ventures like Ancient School he’d have been my guess for the force behind ParanormalDate.com, a site that does not match users to aliens but rather matches believers in aliens, ghosts, cryptids, and other fringe topics. Coast to Coast AM host George Noory launched ParanormalDate.com on Tuesday, according to a Huffington Post article.
In a new Mysterious Universe article, Nick Redfern offers the latest variation on an old story he’s been telling over and over again since his 2010 book Final Events. In fact, he’s told versions of this same story on Mysterious Universe itself in 2012 and again in 2014, and he is currently recycling it for his recently published book Secret History and a forthcoming book on “Women in Black.” Each time the story is the same: According to an Episcopal priest and former MUFON director named Ray Boeche, the U.S. government has concluded that space aliens are actually demons from hell, and that the UFO agenda is to bring about the End Times by seducing humanity into believing in space aliens instead of Satan’s minions. In 2012, for example, Redern (re-)quoted Boeche as having once said:
In New Interview, Scott Wolter Says "Nasty" Jason Colavito Knows How to "Manipulate the Internet"6/4/2015
“It’s a marketing campaign now.”
That’s how America Unearthed host Scott Wolter described his advocacy of fringe history in an interview broadcast on KFAI Radio in Minneapolis-St. Paul last night in the documentary Minnesota’s Runestone: Whose History Is It? Wolter told interviewer Brigitta Greene that he has stopped trying to work with “academics” because academics try to “baffle me with bullshit” and are closed to new facts. Instead, he said, he hopes to appeal directly to the public in order to foment widespread demand to hold academics accountable for explaining why they reject hyperdiffusionism and historical conspiracy theories. Today’s topic is primarily for Fallen Angel or Nephilim completists, but it also answers a nagging question that has been lingering in the back of my mind for a long time now. The question wasn’t really of any importance, but I’m glad to have it solved.
Last year I discussed the Masonic Matthew Cooke manuscript, written around 1450, and one of the oldest of the Masons’ early documents. The text, which purports to describe the craft of stonemasonry from the dawn of time down to the Middle Ages, contains a strange variant of the legend of the two Pillars of Wisdom famous from Jewish lore. These pillars, first mentioned by Flavius Josephus, were supposedly erected before the Flood by (take your pick) Hermes Trismegistus, Watchers, Nephilim, Seth, Enoch, Enosh, etc. in order to preserve either divine science or the secret teachings of the Fallen Angels or the industrial arts from potential destruction by flood or flame. As Josephus put it in describing the astrological knowledge of the progeny of Seth in Book 1 of his Antiquities: The author of the month for June over at Graham Hancock’s website is artist Michael MacRae, who is promoting his 2014 book Sun Boat: The Odyssey Deciphered, which claims that Homer’s Odyssey is a coded discussion of a circumnavigation of the earth. This claim puts MacRae a bit beyond Henrietta Mertz, who merely claimed it told of a transatlantic voyage, but in good company with some nineteenth century theorists who thought that Jason and the Argonauts had sailed around the world to the extremities of the Arctic and to Peru. Anyway, MacRae’s claim is prima facie false to anyone who knows anything about the composition of the Odyssey, but we’ll take a look at his claims anyway.
The annual “Contact in the Desert” meeting of fringe history and UFO fans ended in Joshua Tree last night after three days of zany speeches about conspiracies and aliens. According to Victoria Irwin of Fangirl Nation, who attended the event, the most notable part of the conference was the fact that the vendors who hawked their wares to the mixture of more than 2,000 conspiracy theorists and neo-hippies in attendance were mostly selling New Age holistic healing paraphernalia such as crystals, hippie clothes, organic food, and “natural” cures, all set to the tune of 1970s pop music—probably a conscious nod to the average age and cultural affiliation of fringe believers. Guests could also partake of ’70s favorites like aura photography, and they could see Nick Redfern, dressed like the teenager he was in the 1970s in a black t-shirt and bandana, both emblazoned with skulls. There was, by all accounts, copious amounts of marijuana being smoked, and every observer noted that the vast majority of attendees, as USA Today put it, “were united by their skepticism of common science, doubt of by-the-book history and distrust of the U.S. government.” Just like in the 1970s!
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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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