Blog Archives

Review of Ancient Aliens S13E13 "The Artificial Human"

8/31/2018

After thirteen episodes and sixteen hours of television—since three episodes were double-length—the thirteenth season of Ancient Aliens comes to a close with an episode devoted to killer robots. This has nothing to do with space aliens, really, but it is symptomatic of the slow mission creep that has infected Ancient Aliens over the many years since it ran out of ways to repackage the thin gruel of Chariots of the Gods over and over again. Originally, Ancient Aliens was a show about the ancient astronaut theory. More recently, as producer Kevin Burns confirmed to the New York Times, it became a pseudo-Gnostic search for God. More recently still, with the rise of its Alien Con sci-fi convention spinoff and the transformation of Ancient Aliens into a lifestyle brand, the show has become a sort of all-purpose dumping ground for geek culture as filtered through a theosophical, pseudo-spiritualist lens.

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Astrological Calculations of the Flood and the End Times in Medieval Literature

8/31/2018

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Later tonight is the two-hour season finale of Ancient Aliens, but in the meantime, I have an interesting medieval text to share with you. If you are a fan of ancient mysteries, you’ve probably encountered at least one variation on the theme that when the stars come around to a particular position in their 26,000-year cycle around the heavens, the end of the world is at hand. It’s become a staple of the genre over the past several decades, led in large measure by alternative history writers who have used the precession of the equinoxes—the slow movement of the stars through the zodiac over 26,000 years—to claim that the Sphinx was built during the Age of Leo, or that religious beliefs change every 2,160 years when the sun enters into a new house of the zodiac.

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Summer Rerun: Alan Landsburg, Ancient Aliens, and Another Quotation Fabrication

8/30/2018

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Editor's Note: I am taking a couple of days off this week as summer winds down, fringe authors are enjoying their vacations, and blog readership is low. Enjoy this rerun of a piece, lightly adapted, that first ran in October 2012.

In the fall of 2012, I told you how Rod Serling became involved in ancient astronauts as his Night Gallery series was in the process of being cancelled. Serling’s producer for the In Search of Ancient Astronauts documentary that launched the ancient astronaut “theory” in the United States was Alan Landsburg, who turned his follow-up documentary, In Search of Ancient Mysteries, into a book of the same name. So why did Landsburg fail as an ancient astronaut theorist?

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Hermes' Forbidden Wisdom in the "Book of the Secret of Creation"

8/29/2018

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Recently, I completed a translation of some lengthy excerpts from the Book of the Secret of Creation and the Art of Nature (Kitāb sirr al-ḫalīqa), an Arabic-language treatise on Hermetic philosophy and cosmology attributed to Apollonius of Tyana (Balīnūs). It takes the form of a multi-book disquisition on the secret of creation, which is that all things are made from differing ratios of hot, cold, wet, and dry. (It was, in the end, a disappointing secret, not dissimilar to the harmony of the elements in Macrobius.) Several of the books pose questions about the natural world and explain them in tedious detail about the evaporation and condensation of primaeval fluids. The volume is famous as the oldest extant source for the famed Emerald Tablet, which became better known in the West from a Latin translation of a separate recension of the tablet’s text from a different and later Arabic source. Perhaps more interesting is the frame story attached to it, telling of how Apollonius discovered ancient wisdom in books held by a statue of Hermes Trismegistus in an underground chamber in Tyana, in modern Turkey:

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The Same Russian Troll Accounts Tweeting Election Propaganda Were Also Tweeting about UFOs and Ancient Mysteries

8/28/2018

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I’ve received quite a bit of criticism for my conclusion that the Russian government has purposely promoted UFO and ancient astronaut beliefs as part of their propaganda efforts aimed at destabilizing the West. As part of that campaign, Russian trolls and bots made more than one million tweets to influence the 2016 election. Twitter recently deleted those tweets in an effort to clean up its service, but NBC News published a spreadsheet containing 200,000 tweets from Russian propaganda accounts sent in 2016 and 2017. A significant, though not overlarge, number of Russian propaganda tweets were about UFOs, ancient astronauts, and ancient mysteries.

Here are a few representative samples of the Russian retweets. I have stripped them of the linked articles to avoid promoting bottom-feeding clickbait and propaganda sites.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S13E12 "They Came from the Sky"

8/24/2018

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Two centuries ago, there were still scientists who doubted that rocks could fall from the sky. It was a matter of grave interest for several decades until it was finally discovered that meteors existed and that such rocks—known then as aerolites—could fall from the heavens and reach the earth below. It took until the 1860s for scientists to establish a consensus that meteors not only fell from the sky but originated in outer space, rather than from the ejecta of volcanoes or other earthlier explanations. Surprisingly, however, it took a very short time for antiquarians to begin suggesting that famous rocks from history were cosmic in origin. The Rev. Basil Henry Cooper, writing in 1867, correctly intuited that the Egyptians made use of meteoric iron, a fact not confirmed archaeologically for half a century. In a paper delivered in 1895, Arthur Harvey spoke about “Aerolites and Religion” and declared that “It would be surprising if in the earlier ages of the world men had not seen in the meteorite not merely a message from the gods but a messenger, a very god himself.” He concluded, most likely correctly, that many ancient divine statues and sacred rocks said to have fallen from heaven were meteors, such as the black stone at the corner of the Kaaba, the divine black stone of Emesa (modern Homs) in Syria, and many other examples besides.

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Thursday Odds and Ends: History Channel Ratings, Dating the Thera Volcanic Eruption, and Hermes' Receipt of Angelic Knowledge

8/24/2018

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Today I have a few brief topics to discuss as we await tonight’s broadcast of Ancient Aliens. The first is an update on the ratings for Ancient Aliens and its lead-out, In Search Of. According to figures released by Nielsen, Ancient Aliens is trending downward, sinking since the start of the current run of episodes to just 1.075 million viewers, a loss of about 10 percent of its audience from the start of the current half-season. I wonder if the new, slower format and primary focus on one ancient astronaut theorist and one location or “quest” per show is boring some of the audience. Meanwhile In Search Of pulled a surprising reversal. While it has not improved its ratings over its run, it did outdraw Ancient Aliens—just barely—this past week, bringing in 1.090 million viewers. A modestly larger number of men and older people watched In Search Of than Ancient Aliens. The two shows are now running neck-and-neck, but largely due to Ancient Aliens’ declining ratings than any particular momentum behind In Search Of.

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Summer Rerun: Did George Smith Inspire Zecharia Sitchin?

8/23/2018

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Editor's Note: I am taking today off to work on projects other than my blog. Please enjoy a repeat of a classic blog post from my archive. This piece originally ran in July 2012.

In Twelfth Planet (1976), Zecharia Sitchin first proposed his theory that there was a wandering planet named Nibiru. He seems to have based this entirely on a pair of weird misconceptions. The first was the translation of the word nibir or nibiru, which meant either "wandering stars" or "planets," not "wandering planet." This is because the ancients did not understand that the planets were distinct in substance from the stars, only that they were lights in the sky like the stars but which moved differently (i.e. wandered). George Smith understood this distinction as far back as 1876 in his Chaldean Account of Genesis:

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Great Moments in Hermeticism: Ibn Umayl's Visit to a Temple of Imhotep

8/22/2018

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In medieval alchemy, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes took pride of place, allegedly an ancient distillation of wisdom discovered by Alexander the Great. Albertus Magnus, in a book on the secrets of chemistry written around 1200, gives the story: “Alexander the Great discovered the sepulchre of Hermes, in one of his journeys, full of all treasures, not metallic, but golden, written on a table of zatadi, which others call emerald” (trans. Thomas Thomson). This story, in turn, is a corruption or adaptation of an earlier Islamic myth, in two variants. One held that Sarah, the wife of Abraham, found the emerald tablet (written in Phoenician) held in the hands of a statue of Hermes at his tomb in Hebron, and the other than the honor fell to Balinas, who accomplished the same feat in Tyana, taking the Syriac-language tablet from the hands of Hermes’ corpse: “After my entrance into the chamber, where the talisman was set up, I came up to an old man sitting on a golden throne, who was holding an emerald table in one hand” (anonymous 1985 trans.). Another Arabic treatise, translated into Latin in the twelfth century, replaces Balinas with Galienus (an obvious misreading): “When I entered into the cave, I received from between the hands of Hermes the inscribed Table of Zaradi, on which I found these words” (trans. Steele and Singer).

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Nazi Wonder Weapons and Their Impact on Ufology

8/21/2018

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All About History magazine is out with its September edition, and I am proud to announce that I have the cover story, on “Hitler’s Super-Weapons,” known as the wunderwaffen. The magazine is on newsstands in the U.K. (assuming those still exist), and it is available worldwide through All About History’s website.

The article discusses the Nazi regime’s efforts to create fantastical weapons in a last-ditch effort to regain military advantage over the West, including Germany’s rocket program, its nuclear program, and even Himmler’s team of psychic remote viewers. In the final couple of paragraphs, my article briefly outlines some of the ways that these weapons became embedded in popular culture, expanding in popular memory into nearly supernatural exemplars of demonic power. However, while this was an important point, there wasn’t space to go into detail about the connection between the wunderwaffen and some of the extreme views of history popular among the fringe.

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