Blog Archives

On the Rhetoric of Anti-Elitism in Fringe History and Right Wing Politics

7/31/2014

I’ve never heard of the Covert Chronicle. It’s apparently a video podcast that runs on its presenter’s YouTube channel. Yesterday the Covert Chronicle presented several minutes about the launch of Giorgio Tsoukalos’s In Search of Aliens, which the presenter framed as a battle between Tsoukalos and his “arch-nemesis,” me. The insults and slipshod logic descend into self-parody, so I will simply provide you with the video for your own amusement:

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Who Was the First Person to Receive an Alien Anal Probe?

7/30/2014

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The post has been updated to include information on the Hill abduction and anal probing provided by Robert Sheaffer.

In Weird Al Yankovic’s new parody song “Foil,” he sings about the need for tinfoil hats “in case an alien’s inclined / to probe your butt or read your mind.”

Why it is that aliens want to probe our butts; or, more specifically, when exactly did people start claiming that aliens gave them anal probes? I know this is a silly question, but silly questions often end up revealing hidden layers and secrets. And I have not been able to find a satisfactory answer to what should have been a simple question.

Anal probes are now such an established part of the UFO phenomenon that you’d think there’d be a clear answer to that question, but if there is, I can’t find one. Many UFO books refer to it, and many assume that it’s just a given during an abduction, but I can’t find a catalog of anal probing events or a timeline of when they supposedly started. Even the otherwise exhaustive Wikipedia lacks an entry for alien anal probes. There must be something about it somewhere, but since I am not as familiar with modern UFO material, I am not sure where to look for it.

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Greg Little Is Still Mad about My 2013 Post on Giant Bones

7/29/2014

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Guess who is still angry with me. Did you guess Scott Wolter? Well, OK, yes, he did post a response a couple of months ago to an Amazon.com book review of his Hooked X® that referred to me and falsely claims that I was wrong about his honorary master’s degree not existing: “Just what exaggerated credentials are you talking about? You obviously didn't read my response to the misleading and incorrect blogger’s post in the Internet about my academic credentials.” We here “in the Internet” know the difference between a master’s degree and a cup of coffee, which is what he was actually awarded, but I don’t want to talk about him. Instead, Dr. Greg Little is the one who’s still mad at me this week!

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Fringe Festival Founder Claims Bronze Age Was Paradise of Peace and Harmony

7/28/2014

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I keep trying to understand why people think crystals contain magic powers that can make rocks float, but I just can’t wrap my head around it. I understand that crystals, under considerable compression (mechanical stress), will generate piezoelectricity, but how does this translate into “crystal technology” that can shoot tractor beams that make rocks weightless? As I understand it from the 1985 book Crystal Power by Michael Gary Smith, this involves using crystals to focus “mental and emotional powers” and relates somehow to the lost technology of Atlantis, which we all know did not exist before Frederick S. Oliver invented it in Dweller on Two Planets (1894/1905). This is just one reason I was confused by Eternal Knowledge Festival founder Lucy Wyatt’s piece on Graham Hancock’s website from earlier this month in which she agrees with the power of crystals but seems to think it gives us magical mental powers rather than physical ones. Keeping it all straight is just too hard.

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Did Stone Age Freemasons Encode Cult Secrets in Gobekli Tepe, the Irish Language, and Spanish Plays?

7/27/2014

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It’s been many years since I regularly visited Graham Hancock’s website, but I try to check in now and then to see the articles that his network of contributors put up. They are often a good barometer of what’s going to be hot in fringe history at any given time. I’ve been busy and haven’t been by in a couple of months, so I have only now seen a bizarre piece by Trebha Cooper that ran in late June. If I read the piece correctly, Cooper is arguing that the Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe directly influenced Celtic Gaul and medieval France due to a secret cult of Freemasons. Somebody call Scott Wolter!

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Review of In Search of Aliens S01E01 "The Hunt for Atlantis"

7/26/2014

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Giorgio Tsoukalos, I think it’s fair to say, is not a scholar or a researcher or even an investigator; instead, he is a showman. The Ancient Aliens star and consulting producer went to college (my alma mater, in fact) for sports information communication and spent his formative years as a promoter in the world of professional bodybuilding. His love for the threadbare mysteries of Erich von Däniken led to a position as the ancient astronaut theorist’s English language spokesperson and gatekeeper, in which capacity I interviewed him as a college student in 2002. In the interest of disclosure, I refer you to my 2011 essay on “My Alien Afternoon with Giorgio Tsoukalos” for an explanation of why Tsoukalos accused me of having “malevolent intentions” and as late as 2012 still refused to be in the same building with me.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S06E23 "Faces of the Gods" (Special Edition) and S07E01 "The Reptilians"

7/25/2014

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The H2 network knows where its bread is buttered, and there is a good reason that so much of its schedule is devoted to day-long blocks of Ancient Aliens reruns. Tonight H2 makes explicit the network’s almost complete dependence on fringe history programs to sustain itself as an independently profitable arm of its parent, History, and their shared overlord, A+E Networks. In the course of the three hours of primetime, H2 showed a new episode of Ancient Aliens: Special Edition followed by the seventh season premiere of Ancient Aliens and the first entry in Ancient Aliens star and consulting producer Giorgio Tsoukalos’s new ancient astronaut series In Search of Aliens. This is too much even for my seemingly boundless patience for fringe history.

This blog post will review Ancient Aliens S06E23 “Faces of the Gods” (Special Edition) briefly and then Ancient Aliens S07E01 “The Reptilians” in a bit more depth. A separate post will review In Search of Aliens, but tomorrow. I can only take so much at once.

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Preparing for Tonight's Ancient Astronaut Extravaganza on H2

7/25/2014

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Oh, it’s getting ridiculous. The New York Daily News ran a tongue-in-cheek piece about the alleged UFO cave art in India reported in the Times of India, and rather than suggest that maybe the story isn’t quite solid, they decided to take the opposite tack and tell readers that the find had been “confirmed.” The paper then suggested that Ancient Aliens would be the right place to “investigate” it. At least they got that right.

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Christian Novelist Blames UFOs on Fallen Angels after "Ancient Aliens" Shook His Faith in Jesus

7/24/2014

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Well, this was bound to happen. Ancient Aliens pundit William Henry has seized upon the Times of India’s credulous report that cave paintings in north-central India are 10,000 years old and depict space aliens. There is much reason to be skeptical of the Times’ claims, as this French-language article shared with us by Irna makes quite plain. The cave paintings in question are not newly discovered and are in fact listed in a tourist brochure for the region, and have been investigated since 1910. Local authorities believe some of the paintings are relatively recent (compared to 10,000 years old), and depict scenes from the life of Rama.

Henry notes that one of the cave images colors a group of humanlike shapes yellow and therefore he compares these shamanic images to the “golden robes” of the Anunnaki and the “robes of light” of Jesus Christ. He asks whether these beings are proof of alien encounters in the distant past. I am not aware of any Mesopotamian text that identifies the Anunnaki as wearing golden robes, though in the “Descent of Ishtar” the Anunnaki sit on golden thrones. Nor is there any indication that the yellow Indian figures (whose heads are yellow, too) are wearing robes.

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Jim Marrs: Aliens Use Mitochondrial DNA to Rule the World through Rothschild Banking Family

7/23/2014

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According to an article in the Roswell Record (behind login wall), next month Ancient Aliens is going to feature the so-called Roswell Rock, a small stone engraved with two small circles within a larger circle, each containing a crescent-moon shape beside another small circle. Discovered in 2004 about seventeen miles from the alleged Roswell UFO crash site, the rock became the subject of online speculation in 2008. I’m not sure why the fresh-looking carving should be associated with aliens except that the carving resembles 1990s-era crop circle patterns. Aliens are confusing.

That’s probably why we need Jim Marrs to explain their doings to us. Marrs has a chapter in the new anthology Lost Secrets of the Gods: The Latest Evidence and Revelations on Ancient Astronauts, Precursor Cultures, and Secret Societies edited by Michael Pye and Kristen Dalley (New Page, 2014), which was released on Monday. The subject? What else: Why ancient aliens and the Jews are in league to control global finance.

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