I have a fun one today, but boy was it confusing! Our story begins with the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. According to legend, when Howard Carter broke into the tomb, he triggered an ancient curse, which read “Death comes on wings to he who enters the tomb of a Pharaoh.” The particular wording of his curse is unusual, all the more so since it doesn’t seem to appear in print until the end of the twentieth century, attributed to a bewildering array of sources. Sometimes it is said to come from a tablet found in Tut’s tomb, or just as an Arabic proverb. Sometimes it is said to have been inscribed about the entrance to the tomb. Other times, it is claimed that newspapers printed the curse either a month before or in the week after Lord Carnarvon, sponsor of the excavation of the tomb of King Tut, died on April 3, 1923 from blood poisoning from a mosquito bite.
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Anyone who has watched Ancient Aliens knows David Wilcock, the David Spade lookalike who is willing to say anything as long as it results in more publicity and greater sales. Wilcock on-screen appearances are very different from the bat-shit crazy drivel he feeds his followers on his Divine Cosmos website. Wilcock is currently ramping up promotion for his newest book The Ascension Mysteries, which promises to explain the “cosmic” battle between good and evil, and in anticipation he published an incoherent mess of an article about cargo cults, spaceships from Draco, and the secret space program.
Today I have two topics to discuss. The first is a follow-up to yesterday’s post, and the second is a look at an allegation that a Masonic/Prehistoric conspiracy is operating in American professional sports.
Rough Research In December 2012, America Unearthed asserted that an Englishman named “Rough” Hurech visited Arizona in 1200 CE and taught the Natives to build cliff dwellings, leaving evidence in the form of a grave stone bearing his name in Anglo-Saxon runes. Yesterday I mentioned that runic scholar Henrik Williams informed me that there is a historical record for a man with the surname of Hurech living in England around 1200 CE, confirmation of a claim made by Alan Butler on the second episode of America Unearthed but denied by the records office in the county where Butler claimed to have received the information. I added this to yesterday’s blog post, but I wanted to take a moment to share the information and what it means.
This week J. Hutton Pulitzer and Scott Wolter released their next commentary track on the 2012-2013 season of America Unearthed. It is the second in their series and the latest release from the pair’s new XpLrR partnership. It was, of course, more of the same conspiracy mongering, but Pulitzer’s Trumpian levels of blowhard ignorance make me feel embarrassed for Scott Wolter, and that takes some doing. This week’s commentary track covers S01E02 “Medieval Desert Mystery,” which I reviewed in 2012.
Actress Megan Fox, an ardent fan of Ancient Aliens, made headlines again with a ridiculous claim in the Los Angeles Times in which she alleged that the Egyptian government is covering up the true origin and purpose of the Great Pyramid. She also said she wants to host her own fringe show on the Viceland channel, corporate cousin to the History Channel and Ancient Aliens. According to Fox, an unnamed person “high-ranking in the field” confessed the truth about the Great Pyramid while giving Fox and Shia LaBeouf a tour of Khufu’s construction in 2009.
Holy Bloodline Believers Claim Their Beliefs Shouldn't Be Lumped in with "Extremely Fringe Stuff"6/5/2016 Yesterday Scott Wolter challenged critics to provide evidence regarding the Kensington Rune Stone that would meet the standard of admissibility for a court of law. That’s a rather silly an arbitrary standard for a scientific claim, given that evidence in law courts isn’t meant to establish the truth, particularly evidence admitted by the defense, which need not do more than establish reasonable doubt. Courts are also not always right, either. Courts have determined that evidence supported racial segregation and eugenics, among other things. Besides, Wolter himself failed to provide enough legal evidence to convince a judge when he was sued in 1988 and failed to prove he could distinguish a valuable Lake Superior agate from a worthless Brazilian agate.
This week National Geographic caught up with the teenager who thought he had discovered a lost Maya city by applying fringe-history style star correlations to a cherry-picked selection of Maya settlements in order to trace the constellations on the ground. William Gadoury, 15, told the magazine that he did not plan to let the facts get in the way of his certain belief that he found a lost city. He is looking to raise $100,000 to travel to Mexico to prove that his lost city exists despite widespread consensus that his “city” is actually an abandoned agricultural field, likely one used for marijuana.
A Texas man found a rock in Ogden Canyon, Utah in 2013 that he claims is the skull of a Bigfoot. Even though the object is very clearly a rock, Todd May claimed in an interview yesterday that there is a conspiracy by “haters” to deny that he has the first tangible evidence of Bigfoot. “There’s haters out there, other Bigfoot enthusiasts that don’t like that I found something first,” May said when he showed up unannounced at the Times Record News offices carrying his rock and asking to be in the paper. The newspaper asked a geologist to examine the rock, and unsurprisingly it is a rock.
The Fringe Is Really Excited about a Translation of a 2015 Danish Article about Runes in Sweden6/2/2016 This past week Red Ice Creations, the fringe radio and web network with a penchant for hosting white nationalist figures, posted a machine translation of a Danish article from last year which described academic research into isolated Swedish communities that continued to use an archaic tongue related to Old Norse and to write in runes down to 1906 or so. This article caused quite a stir on social media for a mixture of rather incoherent reasons, ranging from Aryan supremacists who lauded medieval Aryan culture surviving against the onslaught of non-Aryan influence from the south, to fringe historians who seemed to read into the story proof of a vast conspiracy of uncertain dimension.
After reviewing the results of the newsletter survey I posted a few days ago, I found that the overwhelming majority of respondents (however representative they might be) would like to see my newsletter revamped as a monthly PDF magazine. To see how feasible this might be, I am trying to learn desktop publishing software. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. Granted, the last time I learned a whole new suite of software was when I picked up graphic design software skills a decade ago. The gold standard for desktop publishing is either Adobe Indesign or Quark Xpress. I have a half-memory of using Quark a bit in college, but that was a long time ago. Plus, I’m cheap. So I’m trying to learn Scribus, the free alternative to Quark. I am not finding it intuitive at all. I have a feeling that if I can master the creation of page templates, a magazine might be feasible. But I’m not sure how long it will take me to learn enough to do it right.
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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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