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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E13 "The Constellation Code"

8/31/2019

When Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert published The Orion Mystery in 1994, their claim that the Egyptians had laid out the Giza pyramids to represent the stars of the constellation Orion sparked a cottage industry among so-called “alternative archaeologists” looking for constellation “alignments” at ancient sites around the world. Locations as diverse as the Hopi Mesas and the temples of Angkor Wat have seen themselves reimagined as “heaven’s mirror.” But like most modern myths, the constellation alignments are a contemporary fiction created through the selective application of imagination to sites that bear little to no resemblance to the constellations they supposedly depict.

The claim that ancient sites reflected the stars, however, did not originate with Robert Bauval. In Antiquity, writers had noted that the Nile flood was associated with Sirius and the constellation of Leo. In the Middle Ages, the Arabs believed that ancient Egyptian temples and tombs had all been dedicated to the “stars”—by which they meant the seven planets of astrology (i.e., the five visible planets, plus the sun and moon)—and they had a bewildering array of legends about the connections between temples and stars. One medieval Arabic poem preserved by Al-Maqrizi pointedly asks if the Giza pyramids were “observatories for the planets.” The poet then added—pointedly, for our purposes—that they might also be “descriptions of planetary calculations” preserved in stone.

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Göbekli Tepe and the Ancient Infrasound Global Communication System

8/30/2019

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I need to spend today working on writing my new book on pyramid myths before I review Ancient Aliens tonight, so I am going to leave you with this recent YouTube video claiming that Göbekli Tepe and other ancient sites were connected through an “infrasound” network that somehow transcended not just barriers of distance but also of time, communicating between cultures that didn’t even exist at the same time as one another. Many of the claims are warmed over from Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis and Edgar Cayce’s version of Atlantis, but you can see more than a little of the “energy network” claims from Ancient Aliens, particularly when the narrator alleges that the ancient stones received messages from other dimensions or other planets.

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Review of Code of the Wild S01E05 "Aztecs in America"

8/29/2019

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This episode airs Sept. 3.

For more than two centuries, scientists, historians, and treasure hunters have sought proof that Mesoamerican peoples visited or even colonized the lands now part of the continental United States. In the nineteenth century, this line of speculation tended to focus on the Aztecs, who had a myth of coming to Mexico from Aztlán, a land to the north of Mexico. Baron von Humboldt infamously placed Aztlán in the Great Lakes region on the evidence of a painting of a palm tree (don’t ask) and what amounted to some guesswork about how fast they might have walked across the 416 years of their wanderings from Aztlán to Mexico. “It is almost certain,” Humboldt wrote in Researches Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America (1810), “that we must look for the first country of the Mexican nations, Aztlan, Huehuetlapallan, and Amequemecan, at least North of the 42d degree of latitude” (trans. Helena Maria Williams). Humboldt’s claim was so persuasive that he succeeded in getting scholars to speak of the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan as “Aztecs” from Aztlán instead of the Mexica of Mexico.

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Running Some Numbers on "Ancient Aliens" and Its YouTube Competitors

8/28/2019

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Last Friday, Ancient Aliens course-corrected a bit by backing away from the sci-fi nonsense and returning to a more traditional examination of an exotic location for evidence of prehistoric visitation. They were rewarded by a slight uptick in ratings, rising to 966,000 viewers—up nearly 100,000 from the previous week, but still far below its season and series averages. As far as ratings go, it’s no My Lottery Dream House, which has outdrawn it each week. William Shatner’s The UnXplained continued its series-long run of building on Ancient Aliens’ total number of viewers 18-54, but for the first time its total audience was smaller than that of Ancient Aliens—by 1,000 viewers.

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Reflections on Brotherhood and Redemption in "13 Reasons Why"

8/27/2019

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Today I am going to break format, as I did a year ago, to discuss the new season of the Netflix drama 13 Reasons Why. Regular readers will recall that my first real job after college was reviewing the teen soap The O.C. for a now-defunct online publication (for which show producers gave me a backhanded compliment in its fourth season), and I have retained an affection for the genre that has long outlasted my own young adult years. I hadn’t intended to talk about 13 Reasons Why again, having said all I thought I needed to say last year, but the current season has left me somewhat dumbfounded, almost to the point of regretting that I had defended the controversial show in its unnecessary but intermittently compelling second season. Its third season undoes almost everything that second did right while doubling down on all that it did wrong in ways that made me uncomfortable, both as a viewer and for the actors who had to tell this deeply wrongheaded story.

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Review of Ancient Aliens S14E12 "Islands of Fire"

8/23/2019

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So, here we go again. With Ancient Aliens facing a steep decline in ratings, losing nearly one third of their viewers since the start of season fourteen, we’re facing down yet another episode that repeats the show’s maniacally narrow interests this season. They’ve really latched on to the occult idea that aliens are really interdimensional beings who genetically altered humanity in the distant past. This week, the same theme is visited upon the Hawaiian Islands, but to be frank, this really seems like an excuse to give this week’s ancient astronaut theorist of focus a free vacation. A lot of the episodes recently have seemed like fine excuses for luxury vacations.

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"Code of the Wild" Scores Series-High Ratings for "Lost Race of Giants" Episode

8/23/2019

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This week Code of the Wild aired an episode in which its fraternal hosts searched for a “lost race of giants” in the rainforests of South America. The episode was the series’ highest-rated, and its viewership spiked by almost 100,000 viewers—nearly 25%--to 533,000 live plus same day viewers, according to Nielsen figures. Part of this might be attributed to viewers discovering the show, but the steady ratings for the Expedition Unknown rerun that precedes each episode suggests that this isn’t really the case. While the total viewership is small, it is symptomatic of a disturbing trend: Episodes of fringe cable shows focusing on extreme claims, particularly with biblical or Eurocentric implications, score significantly more viewers than more mainstream mysteries.

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Why Italian Archaeologists Did Not Really Discover Circe's Cave on the Italian Coast

8/22/2019

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Every few months we get a story about how “scientists” have discovered some location associated with a famous myth. This time, the story revolves around a cave where Circe housed Odysseus in the Odyssey. As with most efforts to find the “true” location of Greek mythic tales, this supposed discovery involves a lot of special pleading and a naïve approach to understanding the formation of ancient Greece’s most important poems.

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"The Atlantic" Repeats Afrocentrist Claim about Pre-Columbian Africans in the Americas; Plus: "Epoch Times" Under Fire for Trump Links

8/21/2019

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This past week, conservatives across the country rose up to take on the most pressing issue of the day, the New York Times’ ongoing series reporting on the continuing legacy of slavery on modern American life to mark the 400th anniversary of slavery in the lands that eventually became the United States. Conservative leaders claimed that the paper was doing a disservice to America by sowing division through a discussion of historical facts and making America look bad by explaining the compromises and corruptions that slavery created at the heart of the American social, economic, and political systems. In the Atlantic, Ibram X. Kendi of American University wrote in support of the Times’ project, but in doing so, he offered his own ahistorical claim.

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Tom DeLonge Asks If "Ultra-Terrestrials" Arrived in "Lemuria and Atlantis" Time

8/20/2019

39 Comments

The other day, UFO circuit regular and local Las Vegas TV reporter George Knapp published a statement from Luis Elizondo of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science about recently released emails that Elizondo had sent to the Pentagon requesting permission to share the UFO videos that helped launch TTSA back in 2017. The emails were written in July 2017 while Elizondo was a Pentagon employee but was actively plotting to move to TTSA, which he did in October of that year. While most of the coverage in the UFO community has focused on the question of whether the emails support Elizondo’s claim to have supervised the Pentagon’s pork project UFO-tracking program, I want to highlight a more interesting issue, how Elizondo actually describes the supposed “unmanned aerial vehicle” threat when he isn’t speaking to UFO believers.

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<<Previous

Review of Ancient Aliens S14E13 "The Constellation Code"

Göbekli Tepe and the Ancient Infrasound Global Communication System

Review of Code of the Wild S01E05 "Aztecs in America"

Running Some Numbers on "Ancient Aliens" and Its YouTube Competitors

Reflections on Brotherhood and Redemption in "13 Reasons Why"

Review of Ancient Aliens S14E12 "Islands of Fire"

"Code of the Wild" Scores Series-High Ratings for "Lost Race of Giants" Episode

Why Italian Archaeologists Did Not Really Discover Circe's Cave on the Italian Coast

"The Atlantic" Repeats Afrocentrist Claim about Pre-Columbian Africans in the Americas; Plus: "Epoch Times" Under Fire for Trump Links

Tom DeLonge Asks If "Ultra-Terrestrials" Arrived in "Lemuria and Atlantis" Time

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