For those of you interested in my discussion of Christopher Loring Knowles’s claims about H. P. Lovecraft and Theosophy, Reddit has a very interesting point-by-point rebuttal of Knowles. Despite the author’s less than kind words about me (disparaging my Cult of Alien Gods and denying a connection between Lovecraft and von Däniken because von Däniken never read Lovecraft--pace Jacques Bergier), the rebuttal is an excellent explanation of every point where Knowles went terribly wrong. Knowles will now have a new place to direct his wrath.
Let’s move on to another topic… the end of UFOs. At least that’s what New York Magazine writer Mark Jacobson suggested after attending MUFON’s conference on media coverage of UFOs. According to Jacobson, only 400 people attended the New Jersey conference, a marked decline from the thousands who attended MUFON events in the 1970s. Most attendees, he said, were over the age of 50. As a result, Jacobson believes that the UFO phenomenon is toast.
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The second annual Contact in the Desert event just wrapped up yesterday, and judging by media accounts, the event was better attended than last year’s but just as wacky. According to media accounts, more than 2,000 people attended the event and organizers had to end registration early due to the volume of ticket requests coming from around the world, including Canada, Britain, Australia, and South Africa, in addition, of course, to the United States. According to the Desert Sun newspaper, the attendees came from all age groups, though no children were present. Event coordinator Paul Andrews told the San Bernadino County Sun that “All the people in the UFO community know who these people are and will pay to come see them.”
Micah Hanks, H. P. Lovecraft Accused of (Separate) Efforts to Suppress Truth about Giants, Theosophy8/11/2014 Today I have two topics to discuss. The first is rather amusing in its way. You’ll remember Micah Hanks, the researcher into “giants” who published some criticism of me just about one year ago in which he took exception to my evaluation of claims for a Smithsonian conspiracy to suppress the existence of giants, not because there was any conspiracy but because giants are real. Anyway, a year later Hanks returned to Coast to Coast AM to discuss giants, and he was surprised that listeners accused him of being part of the conspiracy to suppress the truth about a lost race of Bible giants when he declined to endorse the most wide-ranging conspiracies:
Since I reviewed both Ancient Aliens and In Search of Aliens this week, I don’t have another lengthy post in me. Instead, I’m going to direct you to my revised and expanded version of my post on alien anal probes, which I’ve now added as a featured article in my new UFO section of my website. In expanding this article, I went back to some of the source material about Barney Hill’s alleged 1961 alien abduction, as recounted in his 1964 hypnosis sessions, published by John G. Fuller in The Interrupted Journey.
After last week’s anti-Semitic debacle, In Search of Aliens turns to a less controversial subject, the Loch Ness Monster. Yes, episode S01E03 “The Mystery of Loch Ness” plumbs the depths of that utterly uninteresting cryptozoological search for a dinosaur-like creature in a small Scottish lake. What does this have to do with aliens? Good question. I think they ride on its back like Aquaman, or perhaps they signed a peace treaty with the monster to ensure its survival during the K-T boundary event that wiped out the dinosaurs. Show host Giorgio Tsoukalos once asserted that the Grey aliens signed just such a treaty with the coelacanth, so why not also with what Tsoukalos calls “the beast, the monster of Loch Ness”?
Ancient Aliens has clearly run out of topics that are (a) ancient and (b) related to aliens. As a result we got this episode, S07E03 “The God Particle,” about the discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN in 2012. My grasp of particle physics is not nearly as good as my understanding of ancient history, and it is that disconnect between the knowledge of the audience and the facts that stand behind the speculation that allows ancient astronaut theorists to insert aliens into the very fabric of the universe, where they take on the role of God. You will forgive me if my comments are rather truncated since I’m not at all familiar with the physics behind the Higgs Boson—though neither are ancient astronaut theorists.
The more I think about it, the more telling it is that the show has permanently retired the old Ancient Aliens title card, which featured a faux-Egyptian tomb wall, in favor of the new blue one that shows the cosmos bathed in the blue light of God. The show isn’t about ancient times anymore but rather cosmology, in a bastardized sense. David Wilcock Appears on Russian Conspiracy Program to Promote Aliens, Gold, and 9/11 Truth Claims8/8/2014 Regular viewers of Ancient Aliens will immediately remember David Wilcock. He’s the blond-haired spiritual ancient astronaut theorist who bears an uncanny resemblance to David Spade. He also has a penchant for saying some of the most fact-free and unsupportable assertions made on the H2 series. However, since the audience for Ancient Aliens peaked at around 2.5 million people in season two and has bottomed out at around 1 million currently, Wilcock has apparently felt compelled to expand his brand to a larger audience.
As a result Wilcock agreed to appear in an anti-Western Russian propaganda program airing on a REN-TV, an independent Russian broadcaster controlled by a firm linked to a close friend of Russian president Vladimir Putin. The holding company that owns REN-TV is linked to Yury Kovalchuk, who is the target of ant-Russian sanctions put in place as a result of the Ukraine crisis. REN-TV, which was the last channel running programming not directly controlled by the Kremlin, came under fire earlier this month for canceling Russia’s last independent political program that was not towing the government line. Yesterday a producer for the American Heroes Channel’s Codes and Conspiracies contacted me about doing an interview for an upcoming episode on the ancient astronaut theory. The conversation involved some very interesting information that I wish I could share, but while I am still under active consideration for an interview on the show, I can’t say any more. The show wanted me to fly out to Los Angeles for a shoot, but my schedule doesn’t allow me to drop everything for an L.A. jaunt right now. My participation will therefore depend on whether the production team will be doing any shoots in the New York City area.
So on to today’s subject… You’ll recall that Brien Foerster has been pushing the Peruvian “alien skull” claim for a while now, building off of earlier work by the late Lloyd Pye, and still earlier claims dating back practically to the dawn of the ancient astronaut movement. You’ll probably also be familiar with the story of a small, unusual Peruvian mummy found in 2011 and claimed to be that of an alien-human hybrid. I’m interested in the weird nexus between anti-Semitism, Esoteric Nazism, fringe history, and ufology. The more I look, the more connections seem to emerge. The first and most obvious connection is through Morning of the Magicians (1960), the French book by Lovecraft super-fans Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels that introduced the modern ancient astronaut theory and served as a direct source of inspiration for Erich von Däniken. The authors speculated on the role of the occult in Nazism and heavily implied that the Third Reich was part of a continuum of secret history stretching back to the arrival of beings from another planet thousands of years ago. The authors specified that Hitler, while evil, had special access to “Superior Beings,” who were space aliens; that these beings were directly involved in the creation of the Master Race; and that there was a powerful science of alien evil that was directly opposed to “Jewish-Liberal science.” They also asserted that Western scholar suppressed Hitler’s connection to the quasi-spiritual aliens in order to impose a materialist, non-magical worldview.
Today’s post is going up a bit late. Due to a faulty underground cable, more than 5,000 homes and businesses here in Albany lost power this morning. As a result of the outage, I had no power, no internet access, and no way to prepare a blog entry until power was restored this afternoon. Fortunately, however, the power came back on before the ice cream melted.
As you will recall, we’ve been discussing anti-Semitism and Nazism in conjunction with fringe history, so I thought it would be interesting to extend that to a discussion of where these concepts intersect with H. P. Lovecraft. The most obvious place was in Lovecraft’s support for Hitler and his hatred of the Jews, as he wrote in his letters, some of which were quoted by S. T. Joshi in his various books on Lovecraft. (Note: Lovecraft scholars, unlike fringe writers, acknowledge anti-Semitic and racist material.) |
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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