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Scott Wolter and the Secret Templar Fish Code

7/31/2019

59 Comments

 
​Last night, America Unearthed aired its final episode of its first Travel Channel season, and to promote the broadcast, host Scott Wolter published a conspiratorial blog post with Steve St. Clair, who had appeared in earlier seasons as an expert on the extended Sinclair / St. Clair family of France and Scotland. Wolter’s discussion is full of his usual non-sequiturs and wild speculation, beginning with the temporally unlikely notion that the Knights Templar, who were suppressed in 1307, were still on the run around 1400, when the youngest of the original knights would have been 111: “The final episode is arguably the best in a season of 10 really good shows for it reveals exciting new evidence about the fugitive Templar's (sic) activities in North America circa 1400,” Wolter wrote. Granted, Wolter believes that there was a clandestine continuation of the Knights Templar after 1307, but surely at some point even these fictitious secret agents were no longer “fugitives” from kings and popes a century dead.

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Did Russia Fabricate the Majestic-12 Documents?

7/30/2019

52 Comments

 
​On Friday, Ancient Aliens suffered one its worst humiliations in years, falling below the one million viewer mark for a new episode for the first time since its ill-fated one-off Monday airing a while back. Friday’s episode brought in just 876,000 viewers. Its lead-out, The UnXplained, significantly outdrew it with 1.145 million viewers in a timeslot that traditionally sees lower viewer numbers. Both shows, however, had their asses handed to them by the 9 AM showing of preschool favorite Paw Patrol, which was the fourth highest rated show on all of cable that day. My son loves Paw Patrol. Ancient Aliens? Not so much. According to the Nielsen data, the weakness in Ancient Aliens viewership can be attributed to lower than average numbers of people under 34 tuning in to watch. The UnXplained did double the business in that age bracket that Ancient Aliens did. Who knew that William Shatner would be more of a draw for the younger set than Hugh Newman

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E08 "The Reptilian Agenda"

7/26/2019

17 Comments

 
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​It’s hard to come up with much new to say about the ancient astronaut theory after fourteen seasons of Ancient Aliens, but recent episodes have gone above and beyond in repeating ideas from previous episodes, almost to the point that each new show is an instant rerun. I could talk about how the Reptilians are a reflection of pulp fiction snake people or the way that these snake people reflect Theosophy’s reptilian root race, or how these concepts all originate in a pre-Victorian hypothesis that Satan had seeded all of the pagan faiths of the Earth with ophiolatreia, or serpent-worship, in remembrance of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. But doing so would waste much more intellectual energy than is really needed to evaluate a collection of repetitive material about snakes and Reptilians seen in a dozen or more past episodes. 

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Friday Roundup: New Alien-Hunting TV Show, a Metamaterials Update, and Malta's Ancient Astronaut Investigation

7/26/2019

11 Comments

 
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The Discovery Channel has largely tried to stay above the bottom-feeding alien schlock of other cable channels. It farmed out its supernatural shows to sister stations Destination America and the Travel Channel, its conspiracy shows to American Heroes Channel, and its fringe history to the Travel Channel and even the Science Channel. Of course Bigfoot shows were a large part of Animal Planet’s programming for years. (Discovery’s Josh Gates, of Expedition Unknown came out as an ancient astronaut theorist a few years ago, but largely keeps quiet about it.) But now the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel have leaped onto the alien dreck bandwagon with Contact, a new series debuting August 7 in which a team of “experts” with no real expertise in aliens will attempt to prove that aliens are in contact with humanity. They are a CIA “targeting officer,” a “conflict analyst,” an astrophysicist, two ex-military members, and a journalist. I’m not sure what any of those job titles, other than astrophysicist, have to do with analyzing evidence for aliens. But it’s pretty clear from the information about using “government documents” and “eyewitness” testimony that the show is meant as a copy of History’s Unidentified, which used a similar team and similar evidence to (not) find aliens.

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Review of America Unearthed S04E10 "Exodus of the Templars"

7/25/2019

95 Comments

 
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This episode airs July 30.
​Here we are at the end of the first Travel Channel season of America Unearthed. It feels like only yesterday that the season started! This season has been a terrible disappointment. Only a handful of times during the show’s 10-episode run did it attempt the mix of crazy speculation and bonkers pseudo-history that defined its first three seasons. Instead, the current season has been a mix of standard-issue cable filler only occasionally enlivened by a wild claim (ancient astronauts are real!) or unsupportable speculation (the Drake plaque is real!). It was painfully obvious that the Travel Channel was looking for a more palatable version of America Unearthed for a mainstream audience, and audiences responded by … staying away in droves. The show attracted between 1 and 1.5 million viewers in its first three seasons, but this year it struggled to break 0.5 million. This Tuesday’s episode reached 478,000 people in the live plus same day ratings. It lost almost 120,000 viewers from the Expedition Unknown rerun serving as its lead-in. Boring shows lose viewers.

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Hermeticism and Rage Against Materialism

7/24/2019

9 Comments

 
Because of the historical connection between Hermeticism and fringe history, I occasionally look at some of the latest happenings in Hermeticism, but I will confess to being largely uninterested in magic and mysticism for its own sake. Nevertheless, when I skimmed through the new edition of Giuliano Kremmerz’s The Hermetic Science of Transformation, to be released by Inner Traditions later this year, I was taken by part of translator Fernando Picchi’s foreword to the book. In it, Picchi applies to Hermeticism the same rage against scientific materialism that we have seen in fringe works like Graham Hancock’s books and the Ancient Aliens TV series. Here is his particularly dense verbiage, explicating on the notion that a spirit-based immortal ego—i.e., a soul—resides within us but is denied by science:

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Dave Truman Claims Teotihuacan Is an Energy Portal to Hidden Spiritual Dimensions

7/23/2019

23 Comments

 
​Ancient Aliens returned from a one-week hiatus on Friday only to see ratings remain firmly lodged at 1.06 million viewers, hovering around its weekly average. Its lead-out, the debut episode of William Shatner’s new In Search Of knock off The UnXplained, handily outdrew the finale of the show it replaced, Unidentified, and also Ancient Aliens itself with 1.11 million viewers. The oddly consistent ratings for almost literally anything that airs after Ancient Aliens suggests that there is ceiling on the audience for this type of program, and it hovers around 1.2 million people. 

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E07 "The Druid Connection"

7/19/2019

102 Comments

 
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​The question of whether people from the British Isles reached America is almost as old as the European colonization of the Americas after Columbus. John Dee, for example, helped promote the idea that the Welsh prince Madoc colonized America, all part of his scheme to justify British colonization by alleging that it predated Columbus and the Spaniards. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, claims of Irish or Celtic explorations of the Americas became popular as precedent for the then-current mass migration of Irish people to the Americas. In the nineteenth century, Eugène Beauvois brought the theme to its racist climax when he argued in a series of papers—on the flimsiest of evidence—that the Irish had not only colonized the Americas before Columbus but also converted the Natives from Mexico to Hudson’s Bay to Catholicism and civilized the lot of them, until the Natives’ savage natures undid their hard work. When challenged that the “true” discoverers of America might be Norse rather than Irish, he nonchalantly replied that it didn’t matter because the answer “will always be European.” Adding aliens to the mix doesn’t really change the underlying racist origins of the ideas under discussion in this episode.

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102 Comments

I Ran Out of Time to Write

7/19/2019

9 Comments

 
Well, I tried. I almost managed to get the time write a blog post for today, but then Spectrum Cable happened. I had to return to the old equipment from my previous house to close out my account, so I went to the local Spectrum Cable store (which is 40 minutes from me, but, sure, "local") right when it opened to return it. The line was already out the door, and I had to wait 45 minutes until a bored customer service rep finally called me up to his podium to have my equipment scanned. It was my first time in a Spectrum store, and it was like a hellish cross between the Apple Store and a backed-up doctor's office 30 minutes before it closes. When I finally got home, I had a backlog of paperwork and problems and spent most of the afternoon on the phone with customer service robots trying to get through to a person. I had ordered living room curtains, and the description claimed that there were two panels per package. When I opened the package, I discovered that there was one curtain per package cut three quarters of the way through to look like two panels when tied back on a window. The "included" valence was just the top of the single split panel folded over the top of the panel. Even the customer service rep at the store I bought it from agreed that it was a deceptive bit of false advertising on the part of the manufacturer. I also had to speak with a claim representative for the moving company about the steps they broke at my old house in the hope of getting compensated for the repair costs. By the time I got through all this, I had a bunch of work dumped on me and ran out of time for writing. I'll be back later today with an Ancient Aliens review, so there is that. 
9 Comments

Review of America Unearthed S04E09 "Chicago's Mystery Bomber"

7/18/2019

9 Comments

 
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This episode airs July 23.
​The neutered version of America Unearthed airing new episodes on the Travel Channel has steadily become a dull bit of cable wallpaper, interchangeable with dozens of other similar shows. It occasionally has moments of lunacy, but for the most part, it is no more than a step removed from any other half-assed time-filler, trying too hard to be Expedition Unknown without the charm or the humor. It’s a far cry from the conspiracy theory program whose outrageous claims and towering castles of speculation made it a minor cultural phenomenon in its 2012-2015 run on H2. The penultimate episode of this fourth season is a case in point. The subject of this episode is the Chicago Haymarket bombing of 1886, and the show completely passes over a real and legitimate Victorian conspiracy theory that tied the labor movement to the Knights Templar and the Freemasons—the original run’s favorite subjects—in favor of a sober and mostly dull hour in which Wolter lands upon … the suspect the police had fingered in the first place. Instead of proving history is “not what we’ve been told,” Wolter ended up concluding that the original reports were right all along.

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    • Miscellaneous Documents >
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